A Strange Loop

Description

A Strange Loop received its world premiere Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in May 2019. A Strange Loop was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the 10th musical to win the award. Jackson is also the first black musical theatre writer to win this award. In 2018, Jackson was named one of the "Black Male Writers for our Time" by The New York Times. Jackson has also received the Whiting Award for drama and a Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting. Jackson's work has been performed at NAMT, The 24 Hour Musicals, The Barrington Stage Company, Merkin Hall, The Laurie Beechman Theater, Feinstein's/54 Below, The Triad, Ars Nova, Joe's Pub, The Metropolitan Room, The Bruno Walter Library, and ACT in Seattle. He is an alum of the Johnny Mercer Writers Colony, the Ars Nova Uncharted Writers Group, and is a Sundance Theatre Institute Composer Fellow. Jackson holds BFA in Playwriting and an MFA in Musical Theatre Writing from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Michael R. Jackson holds a BFA and MFA in playwriting and musical theater writing from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. His awards include the Jonathan Larson Grant, a Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, a Whiting Award, and a Hull-Warriner Award. A Strange Loop is Michael's professional debut. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2020.

A metafictional musical that tracks the creative process of an artist transforming issues of identity, race, and sexuality that once pushed him to the margins of the cultural mainstream into a meditation on universal human fears and insecurities.-- "Pulitzer Prize Committee" Exhilarating and wickedly funny. A triumph!--Sara Holdren "New York Magazine" To watch this show is to enter, by some urgent, bawdy magic, an ecstatic and infinitely more colorful version of the famous surreal lithograph by M. C. Escher: the hand that lifts from the page, becoming almost real, then draws another hand, which returns the favor. Which came first?--Vinson Cunningham "New Yorker" "An exhilarating cocktail of hilarious lyrical complexity... Michael R. Jackson is a musical talent with deep wells of invention." --Helen Shaw "Time Out New York" "Brilliant... Harrowing...one-of-a-kind... Hyper-observant and hyper-verbal, Jackson lets his remorselessly satirical eye wander, to hilarious and devastating effect...What makes A Strange Loop so powerful, is not an attempt to find 'our common humanity' but an insistence on speaking its own idiosyncratic truth." --Adam Green "Vogue" A full-on laparoscopy of the heart, soul, and loins... A Strange Loop is a gutsy, jubilantly anguished musical with infectious melodies by the very deft Michael R. Jackson.--Ben Brantley "New York Times"