“Identity Heft”
A Strange Loop, a new, raucously profane, satirical, Off-Broadway musical comedy at Playwrights Horizons, is a sometimes painful, sometimes joyous, and sometimes comic cry of angst about a fat, black, gay man writing a musical comedy about a fat, black, gay man writing a musical comedy about being a fat, black, gay man writing a musical comedy, etc. |
James
Jackson, Jr., John-Michael Lyles, Jason Veasey, Larry Owens (in red jacket and hat), Antwayn Hopper, John-Andrew Morrison, L Morgan Lee. Photo: Joan Marcus.
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Antwayn
Hopper, Larry Owens (in
front). Photo: Joan Marcus.
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He also notes how often his name has confused others about
his identity; the same is true of his appearance, which has led people (black
and white) to confuse him with the playwright/director Robert O’Hara. This, he says,
has only further encouraged his preoccupation with establishing his own
identity. And identity is at the heart of A Strange Loop, a show that,
as Usher explains, takes its title from Douglas Hofstadter’s cognitive
science term:
It’s basically about how your sense of self is just a set of meaningless symbols in your brain pushing up or down through one level of abstraction to another but always winding up right back where they started? It’s the idea that your ability to conceive of yourself as an ‘I’ is kind of an illusion? But the fact that you can recognize the illusion kind of proves that it exists kind of?
Get it? Whatever.
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John-Andrew Morrison, James Jackson, Jr., John-Michael Lyles, L Morgan Lee, Antwayn Hopper, Jason Veasey. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Like the paintings of M.C.
Escher, the narrative (and some of the music) keeps looping back on itself.
But the term also refers to a song by Liz Phair, whose lyrics aren’t
particularly loopy. The latter connection seems more attuned to Usher’s
preoccupation with his “inner white girl,” that is, the undue influence on his
own music of that by white-girl singer-song writers like Phair, Joni Mitchell,
and Tori Amos because of the freedom these artists represent as opposed to his
own hang-ups as a gay, black boy in thrall to his mother.
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| L Morgan Lee, James Jackson, Jr., Jason Veasey, Larry Owens (plaid shirt), Antwayn Hopper, John-Michael Lyles. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Usher, a red-tunicked usher at Disney’s The Lion King—frequently
alluded to when names like Mufasa, Nala, Rafiki, Sarabi, and Scar are
attributed to his family members—is a Detroit-raised songwriter living in New
York with a bigtime student debt. He’s struggling to create a “big, black and
queer-ass Broadway show” that avoids the compromises a black artist, who wants
to write something “unapologetically black” has to make to appeal to white audiences,
critics, and backers.
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L Morgan Lee, John-Michael Lyles, John-Andrew Morrison, Larry Owens (plaid shirt), Antwayn Hopper, Jason Veasey, James Jackson, Jr. Photo: Joan Marcus.
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At one point, he’ll be forced by necessity to compromise
when he’s asked to ghostwrite a gospel opera on behalf of moviemaker Tyler
Perry, whose work his family adores (because he writes about “real life”), but
which Usher despises as “crap” and “hack buffoonery.” Much of the show’s humor
comes from how certain characters in Usher’s life parody the broadly
stereotypical Tyler style.
Usher feels worthless because, while “starved for black
affirmation and affection,” he’s unable to find a suitable black partner, his
hookups mainly being white, like the meth-using Inwood guy who does it to him
from behind. It’s a raunchy scene reminiscent of a much funnier one in Torch
Song Trilogy.
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| John-Andrew Morrison, Larry Owens. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
He suffers from the towering guilt of having been raised by
God-fearing people (including his scripture-spouting mother), who reject his
“homosexsh’alities,” worry over his sinful life, and reject his artistic
aspirations. He also can’t avoid reminders of a friend who died of AIDS and
ponders if he can possibly change or is just “stuck with who I am.”
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John-Andrew
Morrison, L Morgan Lee, John-Michael
Lyles, Jason Veasey, Larry
Owens (plaid shirt), Antwayn Hopper, James Jackson,
Jr. Photo: Joan Marcus.
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A Strange Loop explores his anxieties in what the
script calls “daily self-loathings” by representing them as an ensemble of six
singing, dancing, and acting Thoughts. These are performed by the ultra-versatile
L. Morgan Lee (the only female), James Jackson, Jr., John-Michael Lyles,
John-Andrew Morrison, Jason Veasey, and Antwayn Hopper. It’s hard not to feel
that the play is a therapeutic exercise designed to exorcize Jackson’s demons.
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| James Jackson, Jr., Larry Owens, L Morgan Lee, Antwayn Hopper. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Each—helped by Montana Levi Blanco’s many costumes—takes on
two or more caricaturish roles, including Usher’s pious mother and alcoholic
father, an imaginary Mr. Right he meets on the subway, a doctor, an agent, and
a lover. There are also fanciful appearances by such black luminaries as
Harriet Tubman, Carter G. Woodson, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and
others, even “Twelve Years a Slave.”
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| Jason Veasey, Larry Owens. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Usher and his Thoughts sing and dance his problems in a
highly theatricalized format creatively staged by Stephen Brackett and vividly
choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly. Arnulfo Maldonado’s set, flashily lit by
Jen Schriever, makes use of door-sized, neon-outlined cubicles that are either
placed upstage next to one another or sent to opposite sides of the stage.
Toward the end there’s a surprising, if not absolutely
necessary, scenic shift to Usher’s parents’ more naturalistic, overcrowded
home, with a church setting directly overhead. Usher now takes on the role of a
fiery pastor (of the Quasi-Africana Church of God in Christ), castigating gays
by declaring AIDS to be God’s punishment for their transgressions.
The music is heavily rhythmic; the lyrics emotionally expressive,
didactically inclined, and narratively thin; the language often filthy (anal
sex and fellatio, less delicately expressed, get the lion’s share); the
“n-words” and “fag” references endemic; and the familiar African-American
allusions (like Popeye’s chicken) common.
A Strange Loop is highly polished, and the
multitalented Larry Owens makes a splashy New York debut in a tour-de-force
performance. Because of its treatment of black, gay identity, it’s the kind of
play that will provoke reams of socio-political discussion by those more
qualified to discuss it than I.
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L Morgan Lee, John-Michael Lyles, John-Andrew Morrison, Larry Owens
(plaid shirt), Antwayn Hopper (behind him), Jason
Veasey, James Jackson, Jr. Photo: Joan Marcus.
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Regardless of how well directed, designed, and performed A
Strange Loop is, or how often it inserts woke references (like vers bottom,
intersectionality, code-switching, second-wave feminism, and so forth), the troubles
of its solipsistic hero lack the stamina to keep one in the loop for an uninterrupted
interest over an hour and 45 minutes.
Playwrights Horizons
416 W. 42nd St., NYC
Through July 28
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