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Usher wants to be touched the touchers hurt him. Usher wants love from his family his family hurts him. The circularity of Jackson’s project means that it’s difficult for it to progress toward an ending. “Fuck outta here, porch monkey.” An introductory song promises “Black shit! And white shit! … With truth-telling and butt-fucking! There will be butt-fucking!” Yet when the promised intimacy actually does roll around, it is a surprise and - given the man who sleeps with him - an act of masochism. Usher is trying to find a match, but he’s “Too Black,” the Grindr/Scruff/Adam4Adam users say.
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The Thought voicing his mother (the excellent John-Andrew Morrison) calls him often, and these talks alternate between syrupy outpourings and ice-cold denials. Usher has homophobic parents whose beliefs negate him even as they say they are lifting him up. Where he goes deep is a particular anguish: The predicament of being observed and being one’s own observer are not issues you usually grapple with in a Broadway theater, and actually Jackson covers that stuff pretty fast. In fact, he both cherishes and resists his “inner white girl,” not just because he loves Liz Phair, but because white femininity is permitted all the things he’s denied - interiority, shyness, self-celebration. Under his bandbox uniform, Usher wears a #bellhooks T-shirt, so it’s no surprise that he flinches at capitalizing on his Blackness. Another disappointed internal voice (Jason Veasey) calls out of his head: “Usher! Head of Corporate Niggatry here! Just checking in to see if you found your unapologetic Blackness yet? ’Cause your numbers are in the toilet with the Black excellence crowd and you’re real close to cancellation!” Usher bings his little chime and rolls his eyes. One of his Thoughts embodies an agent (John-Michael Lyles) who urges him to ghostwrite a Tyler Perry gospel play Usher recoils at the idea.
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His six swarming Thoughts - including Daily Self Loathing (James Jackson Jr.), Sexual Ambivalence (L Morgan Lee), and Financial Faggotry (Antwayn Hopper) - nag and chasten him they pester him about his inability to finish his musical, to satisfy theater’s gatekeepers, and to pay his loans. (Jackson once ushered at The Lion King.) As Usher plays the Disney-ish return-to-your-seats chime, he also does battle with own brain. The plot, if that’s the right word for something so scattered, is about an usher named Usher (Jaquel Spivey) who works at a show much like The Lion King. Especially in the Lyceum Theatre: It’s a red-velvet-and-gilt balloon, and Jackson makes it go pop. The shock of that sharp emotion strikes like a lance. It’s less vicariously exhausting than it was Off Broadway, perhaps because the company no longer wrecks itself physically with every performance - but it’s still furious, both with the world and itself. “I was gonna use a bunch of her songs in the show but then she wouldn’t give me permission.”Īt breathtaking speed, for an hour and 45 minutes, Loop continues whirling on like this: the Big Ideas and the petty ones waltzing around in Jackson’s profane, hilarious, meta-musical carousel. “But it’s also the name of this Liz Phair song that I really love?” Usher tells the guy, flirting. That checks out, you think: Loop is an Escheresque musical by a gay Black man about a gay Black man writing a musical about a gay Black man writing about himself. As Usher, Jackson’s composer hero, sits on a subway explaining his own musical (also called A Strange Loop) to a stranger, he cites Douglas Hofstadter’s book about “loops” of identity-constructing self-reference. Of course there would be two - Jackson’s stunning show is recursive, redundant, reflective, reflexive. Jackson’s “Big Black and Queer-Ass American Broadway” show, he gives two explanations for the title. In the course of A Strange Loop, Michael R. Jaquel Spivey (center) stars in A Strange Loop, at the Lyceum Theatre.