Playwrights’ Perspective: A Strange Loop

Michael R. Jackson — Fri, 24 May 2024 08:00:00 -0700

In years past, I would often be mistaken for or identified as playwright-director Robert O’Hara. It was like a running gag. And to be clear, it wasn’t just White people who mistook me for him, so it was more complicated than the racism of White people thinking “they all look the same.” But in either case, it was in these moments that my seeming resemblance to another Black man strips me of an identity that is solely my own.

Since I first began writing as a pre-teen, I have been fighting to be recognized as an original and as an individual. I’ve long considered this the ultimate freedom—to be myself—even as critics and others have tried to pin me like a dead butterfly underneath the glass next to a label that reads “Black representation matters.” This seems to be the only thing the very liberal Black and White art/theatre world has the brain capacity for when it comes to Black artists—our collective racial representation, not our individual artistic selves or ambitions Black artists are here to be and feel seen and nothing more. Perhaps the label next to the dead butterfly should read “Black affirmation matters” instead.

W.E.B. DuBois coined the term “double consciousness” to describe the uniquely African American experience of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” But what is a “self” anyway? Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter coined the term “a strange loop” to theorize about the self as merely a collection of meaningless symbols mirroring back on their own essences in repetition until death. He further theorized that a human being is the organism with the greatest capacity to perceive itself perceiving itself perceiving itself ad infinitum.

“What is a ‘self’ anyway?”

A Strange Loop is not formally autobiographical, but I did begin writing it as a monologue in my early 20s when my experience of my “self” was as a mass of undesirable, unloveable, unemployable, unacceptable fat, Black homosexual molecules floating in space without purpose or meaning. I was functionally miserable, relentlessly self-critical and very lonely. It was like I was on the outside of my body looking in and on the inside of my body scratching to get out. Self-hatred is a strange loop too.

When I think back on these “dark café days,” if I might borrow a phrase from songwriter Joni Mitchell, I imagine two killer lines from poems by Emily Dickinson and Nikki Giovanni in a kind of vaudeville act in my head that starts with Emily warmly introducing herself to Nikki with “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” And then Nikki clapping back at her with “I ain’t shit. You must be lower than that to care.” In my estimation, this negative feedback loop perfectly describes where we find Usher, the protagonist of A Strange Loop with his famous name that’s also the name of the occupation he’s working while he, like me, tries to pen a musical with a plot that requires us to ask ourselves questions like “Who is Usher? And who am/what is ‘I’? Whose gaze do I honor? Does it matter? Do I matter? Do Black “I’s” matter? Am I their negro? Am I not their negro? Or am I Michael Jackson? And if I am, do I finally get to claim an identity that is solely my own? Who is Usher? And who am/what is ‘I’? Whose gaze do I honor? Does it matter? Do I matter? Do Black “I’s” matter? Am I their negro? Am I not their negro? Or am I Michael Jackson? And if I am, do I finally get to claim an identity that is solely my own? Who is Usher? And who am/what is ‘I’? Whose gaze do I honor? Does it matter? Do I matter? Do Black “I’s” matter? Am I their negro? Am I not their negro? Or am I Michael Jackson? And if I am, do I finally get to claim an identity that is solely my own?

A version of this essay first appeared in conjunction with the world premiere production of A Strange Loop at Playwrights Horizons in association with Page 73 in 2019.

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Playwrights’ Perspective: A Strange Loop