A Strange Loop – Playwrights Horizons, New York

L Morgan Lee, James Jackson, Jr, Jason Veasey, Larry Owens (plaid shirt), Antwayn Hopper and John-Michael Lyles in A Strange Loop at Playwrights Horizons, New York. Picture: Joan Marcus

A Strange Loop continues at Playwrights Horizons, New York until 7 July 2019.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

The programme photo of Michael R. Jackson, who wrote the book, music and lyrics for the new Off-Broadway musical A Strange Loop, shows a guy with a broad, affable smile. There’s little hint of the raw and almost bottomless agonies he portrays in his show, but as you read through Jackson’s accompanying text, you’ll realise this piece is not going to be a blithe affair.

The show, he tells us: “is not formally autobiographical but I did begin writing it as a monologue in my early 20s when I experienced myself as nothing more than a mass of undesirable, fat, black queerness. I was functionally miserable, relentlessly self-critical, and very lonely.”

All of this is laid out in no uncertain terms in Jackson’s show which takes us deep into the raging mind and imagination of the protagonist Usher.

Like Jackson, Usher bears the name of a pop music idol, but there’s another meaning involved because Usher is an actual usher, working a survival job, getting audiences to their seats at a Disney Broadway musical, a musical where he warns the audience that they will see “swinging birds on fish poles and a black Ken doll with a crossover dialect in a lion costume.”

Usher, who’s hitting his 26th birthday, is more than an usher, though. His total being is tied up in writing musical theatre. In this pursuit and in just about every moment of his day, Usher is accompanied by a sextet of his thoughts.

During the course of the show, the Thoughts embody Usher’s concepts of the people in his life, or in his imagination, or as characters in the musical he is attempting to write. They are identified numerically (Thought 1, Thought 2, etc), and they are vivid role players and tormentors, as well as great backup singers. And they all have their jobs to do in stomping away as Usher searches for a sense of self, through an atmosphere of racism and homophobia. Thought 2, for example, is responsible for serving up Usher’s daily session of self-loathing.

The language is bruising to a fault, filled with gutter talk, graphic description of gay sex acts and bountiful use of the “n” word. But for much of the early part of the show, the anguish and mental grime that Usher is going through is barely noticeable through Jackson’s scintillating, propulsive score. The music, played by a three-piece band with conductor Rona Siddiqui at the keyboard, has a genuine Broadway vivacity.

The give-and-take between Usher and his Thoughts is spiked with humour, and it’s all well-fortified by the spirited staging of director Stephen Brackett (currently represented on Broadway by Be More Chill) and the choreography of Raja Feather Kelly.

At one point, Usher sings of his “inner white girl” struggling to break loose: “White girls can do anything, can’t they?/Black boys must always obey their mothers.” Despite its prejudicial sentiments, the number is a delicious recollection of Hair.

Things become inescapably darker, however. We witness an abusive one-night-stand Usher has with a supercilious white man whose inbred racism is unleashed in the brutality of his sodomy. (And it’s framed in a musical number as well.) The self-shame that Usher feels afterward is heightened by the birthday message phoned in from his parents.

Usher’s mother and father have sacrificed to send their son to New York to pursue his musical theatre ambitions. They have acknowledged but not accepted his “homosexualities”.  They remind him of the dire fate of his childhood friend Darnell, who died of AIDS; the shadow of AIDS is yet another cloud hovering over Usher’s life.

And at the same time, mom and dad urge him to write for them “a gospel play” in the style of Tyler Perry, the movie-maker whose comic depictions of black American life have become unstoppable money-makers.

But when in the galvanising climax of A Strange Loop, we see the “gospel play” Usher might write, it’s a horror show. It takes place at Darnell’s funeral, with Usher the preacher, howling in gospel-like mounting fury that “AIDS is God’s punishment”, backed up of course with a frenzied choir of Usher’s Thoughts.

It’s a relentless, emotionally ugly and musically thrilling sequence that, like much of this remarkable show, will have you glued to your seat. Larry Owens as Usher astounds with his singing and movement, sometimes pure Broadway, sometimes rich with soul, drawing us into the character’s pain without becoming lugubrious. The character’s self-pity is kept miraculously in check by Owen’s projection of the man’s smarts, wit, perseverance and, yes, talent.

The six Thoughts are equally terrific, moving with surreal ease from one persona to another, fluidly shifting race and gender. In one high point, they emerge as ironic specters of black icons, from the abolitionist Harriet Tubman to a dazzlingly gowned Whitney Huston, urging Usher to write his Tyler Perry epic, as his parents want him to do. The group includes L Morgan Lee, James Jackson, Jr, John-Michael Lyles, John-Andrew Morrison, Jason Veasey and Antwayn Hopper.

Montana Levi Blanco’s heavily monotone costumes further lend the Thoughts a supernatural, almost ghostly, air, smartly contrasted against the techno look of Arnulfo Maldonado’s set design and the chiaroscuro of Jen Schriever’s lighting.

It should be noted (and heavily applauded as well) that when Usher’s version of a Tyler Perry play takes over the stage, the set in one breathtaking moment transforms to a double-decker structure showing both church and the comfy ambience of a cartoon-like home, glowing in something like unrestrained Technicolor.

Does this act of creation prove cathartic for the tortured Usher? The ending is ambiguous, but he does in the final number seem headed to a vision of himself that he can accept. At the same time, he reiterates his earlier stated explanation of the play’s title, referring to a theory that in searching for one’s self, the mind goes from one illusion to a series of others and ends back where it started, making “a strange loop”.

That can be a head-scratching idea, but one thing’s for certain: Jackson has created a musical that in extraordinarily courageous fashion pulls us deep into another person’s soul, broadening our understanding of the complexities of others as well as ourselves, always a worthwhile reward for a little less than two hours spent in the theatre. And when it’s done with exciting music as well, it’s especially rewarding.

Ron Cohen