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Book Cover for: A Strange Loop, Michael R. Jackson

A Strange Loop

Michael R. Jackson

Reader Score

83%

83% of readers

recommend this book

Winner:Lambda Literary Award -Drama (2020)
Winner:Pulitzer Prize -Drama (2020)
A radical, metafictional musical wherein a queer black writer confronts the impossibility of fully understanding the self.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
  • Publish Date: Jan 19th, 2021
  • Pages: 120
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.30in - 0.50in - 0.35lb
  • EAN: 9781559369930
  • Categories: LGBTQ+American - African American & BlackGenres & Styles - Musicals

About the Author

Michael R. Jackson was one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2022. His Pulitzer Prize- and New York Drama Critics' Circle-winning A Strange Loop (which had its 2019 world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in association with Page 73 Productions) received 11 Tony nominations in 2022, and was called a full-on laparoscopy of the heart, soul, and loins as well as a gutsy, jubilantly anguished musical with infectious melodies by Ben Brantley for The New York Times. In addition to A Strange Loop, he also wrote book, music, and lyrics for White Girl in Danger, and the book and lyrics for Teeth, which opened at New World Stages in Fall 2024. Awards and associations include: a New Professional Theatre Festival Award, a Jonathan Larson Grant, a Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, an ASCAP Foundation Harold Adamson Lyric Award, a Whiting Award, the Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, an Outer Critics Circle Award, a Drama Desk Award, an Obie Award, a Fred Ebb Award, a Windham-Campbell Prize, a Dramatist Guild Fellowship, and he is an alum of Page 73's Interstate 73 Writers Group.

Praise for this book

"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"
"Exhilarating and wickedly funny. A triumph!"--Sara Holdren "New York Magazine"
"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"
"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"