Looping the ‘Loop:’ Thrills Abound in ACT’s ‘Strange’

The cast of A Strange Loop includes (from left) J. Cameron Barnett, Jordan Barbour, Avionce Hoyles, Malachi McCaskill, Tarra Conner Jones, John-Andrew Morrison and Jamari Johnson Williams at ACT's Toni Rembe Theater through May 12. Photo by Alessandra Mello

The Broadway musical theater canon can finally claim its "big, Black, queer ass American Broadway show" in A Strange Loop, the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner now having its local debut at American Conservatory Theater’s Toni Rembe Theater in a co-production with Los Angeles’ Center Theatre Group.

Bold, mind-bending and moving, A Strange Loop is amazingly enjoyable given what a complex show it really is. With book, music and lyrics by Michael R. Jackson, this is a singular theatrical expression of self, of sexuality, of race, of artistry, of family, of psychology, of philosophy, of being-ness. And it all happens in about 100 astonishing minutes.

My (probably bad) habit with a new musical is to quickly compute what other musicals it reminds me of. For A Strange Loop, I was immediately thinking about two shows: Jonathan Larsen's tick, tick...BOOM! (the struggling New York artist's quest to create a great musical) and Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell's [title of show] (struggling New York artists who love musical theater creating a musical about struggling New York artists who love musical theater creating a musical). But pretty quickly, A Strange Loop establishes itself as something, richer, deeper, more challenging and wholly original.

Let's begin with the title and its multiple references. First, there's a Liz Phair song of the same name (and our story's hero, Usher, name checks her, along with Tori Amos and Joni Mitchell as examples of his "inner white girl"). Then there's the more intellectual meaning, which comes from cognitive scientist (and artist and Pulitzer Prize winner) Douglas Hofstadter, who used the term “strange loop” in the broadest sense to try and describe how beings made up of matter come to have a sense of self and that, as he has put it, “despite one's sense of departing ever further from one's origin, one winds up, to one's shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop.” 

I know. It's a lot. But our musical Strange Loop continually turns back on itself, comments on itself, develops parts of itself, deconstructs parts of itself and still somehow emerges whole and in a sort of profound space where it feels like anything could happen.

(from left) Barnett as Thought 2, Jones as Thought 1, Williams as Thought 6, Morrison as Thought 4, McCaskill as Usher, Barbour as Thought 5 and Hoyles as Thought 3. Photo by Alessandra Mello

The musical's structure, as you might have surmised, is far from traditional. We do have a protagonist, Usher (the marvelous Malachi McCaskill, and the show basically takes place inside his life, which is to say sometimes we’re in his head, where his thoughts are personified by members of the six-person ensemble. Sometimes we're in his actual apartment or workplace (he's an usher at The Lion King), and sometimes we're in a liminal space between past and present, reality and thought.

How do you convey all that on a stage? It helps to have much of the original Broadway team, including director Stephen Brackett, choreographer Raja Feather Kelly, set designer Arnulfo Maldonado and lighting designer Jen Schriever. They bring clarity and momentum to 25-year-old Usher's world of pain, torment, insecurity, desire, occasional exuberance and frequent humor.

Usher doesn't love his day job, but then again he's not very happy with his life as a composer of a musical, which is also called A Strange Loop and focuses on an usher named Usher and his struggles to write a musical that encompasses aspects of his life in his “fat, Black, queer body.” He grew up in a religious household, and though he came out to his parents at 17, they still struggle with his sexuality and constantly remind him that his lifestyle will likely lead to his death from HIV/AIDS. That oppressive fear has impacted Usher greatly, and we see that in two powerful scenes involving men in his life – one chance meeting on a subway, one an older white man with a fetish for using racial slurs while having sex with Black men. We're a long way from The Sound of Music here.

The Thoughts – Jordan Barbour, J. Cameron Barnett, Avionce Hoyles, Tarra Conner Jones, John-Andrew Morrison and Tristan J. Shuler – embody all of Usher’s inner voices (some of them alarmingly vicious) as well as all his family members. They also take on Usher’s creative life when he sets out to please his mother by writing a traditional gospel play (what Usher describes as “coonery”) for Tyler Perry.

While other cultural markers appear with varying degrees of affection (“Designing Women,” “The Golden Girls,” The Color Purple, Popeye's chicken), others appear with ferocity. Just imagine Harriet Tubman wielding a rifle or Whitney Houston trying to steal the limelight. But nobody gets more intertwined into what it means to be Black, God-loving(fearing) and successful than Perry. As the play works toward its nightmarish climax, a Perry-style musical attempts to get the audience clapping along to a repeating refrain of “AIDS is God’s Punishment” as audience members’ heads figuratively explode.

As the strange loop of A Strange Loop circles back around, Usher makes some realizations, including that he doesn't need to change, but even that realization is, in itself, a change. Still, he is back where he started, and there's no musical theater-ish happy ending. Nor is there tragedy. There's lingering potential, which feels like hope. The spark we could see in Usher from the beginning is still there, so when the audience stands to applaud his musical, it feels like that spark has ignited at last, and the strange loop will keep on looping.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Michael R. Jackson's A Strange Loop continues through May 12 at American Conservatory Theater's Toni Rembe Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $25-$137 (subject to change). Running time: 100 minutes (no intermission). Call 415-749-2228 or visit act-sf.org