Review: A STRANGE LOOP at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Write what you know, the adage goes. Thus, John Grisham writes courtroom dramas. Bill and Hillary Clinton write political thrillers. Robin Cook writes stories about medicine.

In A Strange Loop, Michael R. Jackson writes about failure, real and imagined.

Jackson is not a failure, of course - A Strange Loop won the 2020 Pulitzer for drama and well may be headed for Broadway this season - but like every artist, he has experienced failure. In that, he is also like all of us. Although the feelings Jackson conjures are specific to his protagonist, Usher (Jaquel Spivey), they are universal, too - a combination of shock and despair and, most importantly, self-loathing.

You know it too - on the day you learned you flunked the bar exam; on the day you lost the election; on the day you were fired.

On the day your parents told you that you were not the person they intended you to be.

As we first glimpse Usher, he is an usher - at Disney's Lion King show - alone with his Thoughts (L. Morgan Lee, James Jackson, Jr., John-Michael Lyles, John-Andrew Morrison, Jason Veasey and Antwayn Hopper). Usher, having completed his studies at NYU, now aspires to write a powerful musical, about life. His Thoughts have different opinions, and they are wolfish (a strange loup?) and relentless in expressing them. "It's your daily self-loathing! I had some time to kill, so I thought I'd stop by to remind you just how truly worthless you are!," Thought 2 (Jackson) announces to Usher, and it's downhill from there.

You're fat, they tell him. You're too black. Your genitals are small and unattractive. You're a homosexual, in violation of God's plan and your parents' most devout wishes. And you're not getting enough deviant sex. His doctor (Jackson), who prescribes more sex. So Usher goes into the sexual marketplace, where he receives more rejection and humiliation. Even when he finds a sexual partner (Hopper), the encounter is, as Hobbes said of life, nasty, brutal and short.

Did I mention that this is a musical?

His art, the Thoughts tell him, is no good. Write about life? In that immortal line from She Stoops to Comedy, who wants to watch a play about that? Thought 5 (Veasey) advises him to write a play about slavery or police brutality, and rake in the cash. His agent (Lyles), who may be another Thought, reports that Tyler Perry is looking for someone to ghost-write one of his Gospel plays and the Agent thinks Usher would be a good candidate - an idea that delights his mother and enrages Usher himself. He is, he announces vehemently, the anti-Tyler Perry.

Perry, of course, is the enormously successful playwright/director/producer whose heavily commercial art is aimed directly at Black audiences. Tyler Perry plays routinely sell out the Warner Theatre a little more than a day after they are announced. Perry adheres closely to the structure of the Hero's Journey, where a flawed but basically good protagonist is almost defeated by enemies or circumstances, before achieving success, often through religious faith. His plays have outrageous characters, frequently anchored by a large, wisecracking auntie or grannie. In his Medea movies, Tyler plays her in a flowered dress.

Usher wants none of that. Instead, he wants to write about life as a gay black man, a gentleman of size battling to break free of his restraints, to unleash, as he puts it, his "inner White girl" since White girls can do anything they want. He tells a sympathetic patron (Lee) at The Lion King that he is writing a musical about a man writing a musical about a man writing a musical, and so on. That's not what A Strange Loop is, but it is an accurate description of a play about someone in real time experiencing his life.

"The ancestors", real and fictional - Harriet Tubman, Zora Neal Huston, "Twelve Years a Slave" and so on - appear to tell Usher he is a race traitor for refusing to work for Perry. They consider Perry a hero who employs hundreds of African-Americans and who writes plays and movies which speak to Black lives and touch Black understanding. So Usher, who is admittedly bad at confrontation, undertakes to write a Tyler Perry Gospel play - or rather a scalding parody of a Tyler Perry play, featuring the Black self-abasement Usher finds inherent in Perry's work.

The experience drives Usher home to his parents (although the ensemble cast sifts through these roles, Veasey plays the father and Morrison the mother in this, the most real and touching scene in the play). They tell him that they love him, and seem to mean it, but they hate the things he does and who he has become.

USHER-" He wants you to like his writing. His music. This show! He wants you to care about his complexity!"

THOUGHT #5 (Dad) -" Well, he doesn't like your writing, your music, or this show! He loves you, but he doesn't give a rat's ass about your complexity."

His mother is the queen of conditional love. "Though we love you," she sings in "Periodically," which is probably the 11 o'clock song, "Don't repent cause you know it would please us/Son, you should do it so you can see Jesus."

This launches the incendiary second part of Usher's Tyler Perry play, which incorporates elements of Usher's home life with the structure of a Perry-style play. (Usher's family, which includes a cousin suffering from AIDS and a sibling accused of rape, could comfortably fit into a Perry play, but the neat, redemptive ending isn't there.) In this setting, Usher dons a minister's garb, to call down the wrath of God -on himself, and all like him.

This makes A Strange Loop sound like a downer, but it is not. The music occasionally pops (I liked the opening song, "Intermission") but it mostly serves as a vehicle for the scathing, searing lyrics. The lyrics have even more impact because they are sung to such cheery standard-issue-Broadway-type tunes. (I would give you a sample but I'm afraid it would set the internet on fire, or prevent you from sending a copy of this review to a colleague at work, which I'm sure you would otherwise do). Usher's insights into himself, and to the society in which he lives, are funny because they're true. His parody of Perry is hilarious until it is not. Though we may not be Black or gay or overweight, Usher's pain is our pain because it seems universal. And, though he goes through hell, Usher endures.

It helps that the production, by Woolly Mammoth in association with Playwrights Horizons and Page 73 Productions, is spot-on. Each one of the Thoughts was in the Off-Broadway production, and they execute Raja Feather Kelly's complex and beautiful choreography perfectly. These six are actors and dancers, not actors who dance or dancers who act. When they are Thoughts, they radiate the smug knowingness of all of our self-doubts; when they morph into characters they are real and true. The Thoughts deliver much of the musical in Gospel harmony, and they are fabulous at it.

The revelation here is Spivey, who makes his professional debut as Usher. He inhabits this man in all of his contradictions - sad, hopeful, angry, loving, a lonely man who wants to explode in joy and community, a Black man who has an inner White woman - and makes him at every moment believable and sympathetic. He has a good voice, but, more importantly, he acts with every note. He looks the part, but I can easily see him performing parts which are not traditionally assigned to African-American gentlemen of size - as Richard III, for example. This remarkably polished and authentic performance suggests not only that Spivey can anticipate a lengthy and, I hope, lucrative career on stage, but also that Director Stephen Brackett really knows what he's doing.

I know that complimenting the set is traditionally a diplomatic response to someone in a play you don't like, but Arnulfo Maldonado's scenic design is out of the world. Initially, the show uses only the front slice of Woolly Mammoth's stage (the Thoughts come out of six doors, which are set perhaps ten feet behind Usher), but as the story grows in complexity the set recedes, until we are finally in the deep-set reaches of Usher's play within the play. The concept is brilliant and the production executes it flawlessly.

The play's title is derived from the essay "I am a Strange Loop," by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter. His theory - as I understand it - is that the ego does not exist at birth but comes together as a result of exposure to a set of symbols, and therefore the "I" is simply a reflection of a symbolic pattern. Hofstadter's theory doesn't really manifest (Usher tries to explain it during a flirtation, but finds he cannot do so), until the final song, "A Strange Loop," in which he has this insight:

"Maybe I don't need changing/Maybe I should regroup/Cause change is just an illusion... And 'I' is just an illusion..."

Perhaps Usher is on the hero's journey after all.

Running Time: One hour forty-five minutes, without intermission.

A Strange Loop runs through January 2, 2022 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company which is located at 641 D St. NW Washnigton, DC. For tickets, click here.

A Strange Loop, book, music, lyrics and vocal arrangements by Michael R. Jackson. Directed by Stephen Brackett. Rona Siddiqui is the Musical Director. Choreography by Raja Feather Kelly. Featuring Jaquel Spivey, L. Morgan Lee, James Jackson, Jr., John-Michael Lyles, John-Andrew Morrison, Jason Veasey (who is also the Fight Captain), and Antwayn Hopper. Scenic designer: Arnulfo Maldonado. Costume designer: Montana Levi Blanco. Lighting designer Jen Schreiver. Sound designer Drew Levy. Hair, wig and makeup designer Cookie Jordan. Intimacy choreographer: Chelsea Pace. Orchestrations: Charlie Rosen. Erin Gioia Albrecht is the stage manager. Produced by Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in association with Playwrights Horizon and Page 73 Productions.

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