A Strange Loop should be called ‘A Strange Fraud.’
A Strange Loop should be called ‘A Strange Fraud.’
T he 50 percent Persian, 100 percent hilarious comedian Kevan “K-von” Moezzi had New Yorkers howling at Caroline’s on Broadway on April 21. Among other very amusing observations, the handsome, very clever funnyman recalled watching female-soccer champion Megan Rapinoe speak at a March 2021 event in Washington, D.C. The purple-haired winger whined publicly about the parade of injustices that she has endured as a female athlete.
“But you’re at the White House!” K-von said. He added longingly: “I would love to be invited to the White House.”
K-von’s droll comments bounced among the windmills of my mind the next evening during a preview of A Strange Loop, which opened Tuesday night at the nearby Lyceum Theater. For 100 intermission-free minutes, which only felt like two hours, I withstood the ballad of Usher, the seemingly fictionalized alter ego of Michael R. Jackson, this show’s nonfictional creative force.
Jackson has crafted something very special: An epic of self-pity. Think It Sucks to Be Me! — The Musical.
Playbill described Usher as “a young, black, gay theatre writer grappling with his toxic inner thoughts while trying to write a musical about a young, black, gay theatre writer grappling with his toxic inner thoughts while trying to write a musical about . . . and on and on.” Usher is an usher at The Lion King. Thus, the name.
Barely a moment goes by without Usher treading the boards and marinating in self-doubt, self-hatred, and self-discouragement over what he considers the abundant bad hands that life has dealt him. As a black man, gay man, obese man, and ugly man, he doesn’t have a chance in hell of ever prospering in this cold, callous, cruel world.
And with Usher’s every wallowing warble of self-unworth, I kept thinking: “Yeah, but I am watching your show on Broadway right now!”
A Strange Loop could have been composed by Robin DiAngelo (mother of White Fragility) with lyrics by Ibram X. Kendi (father of How to Be an Antiracist). Usher’s status as a gay, black, overweight man qualifies him as an Interstate Highway interchange of intersectionality.
Homophobia, anti-black racism, and fat-shaming are Usher’s best frenemies. They haunt his every waking moment. Indeed, a character called Thought 2 is among a Greek chorus of self-abuse that floats in and out of Usher’s brain. Self-Loathing, as this thought calls himself, pops up periodically to remind Usher just how lame and doomed he really is.
Seemingly everyone Usher encounters bashes his race, sexuality, weight, and looks. They do so while throwing around anti-black and homophobic slurs the way that little kids blow bubbles into the air. The N-bomb is among the hate words that float around so often that Blazing Saddles, by comparison, is an afternoon at the Oberlin College faculty lounge.
Having lived on Manhattan Island since August 1987, I can attest that people here do not attack each other to their faces this way, especially since decades of political correctness, sensitivity training, and today’s cancel culture have made even closet bigots speak to others as sweetly as Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In this sense, A Strange Loop is A Strange Fraud. This is 2022, not 1962.
If a loud, frantic, and profane show in which a character bangs himself over the head with a skillet blows your skirt up, even as a man, then be advised that A Strange Loop bends gender more thoroughly than candy being twisted in a toffee puller.
Multiple characters flow from male to female and back. Usher’s mother appears in a pink suit à la Jackie Kennedy at Love Field. The mom is played, and well, by John-Andrew Morrison. Just try to ignore Mom’s beard as (s)he acts, sings, and tries to convince his/her gay son to find a girlfriend and avoid the HIV virus.
The Left insists that gender has nothing to do with physiology, X and Y chromosomes, or psychology. Maleness, femaleness, and the 56 other genders that Facebook recognizes are mere social constructs, perhaps like the Protestant work ethic. So what if Mom has a penis? Get over it!
Usher is stuck, in part, because he tries to live up to his “inner white girl.” Now whose fault is that? If this guy sees himself not as a proud, black, gay man with boundless opportunity, but as a Tori Amos or Joni Mitchell trapped in a heavy black body, this is society’s fault?
Naturally, the cast members’ pronouns are listed in the program. Understudy Edwin Bates’s pronouns are “he/her/they.”
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?
A Strange Loop is also open, candid, and often shockingly vulgar about homosexuality. The sex-related language on stage is more graphic and coarse than anything I ever have heard in a gay bar. In a way that might thrill homophobes, gay men in this show seem less interested in love and serious (or even semi-serious) relationships. Instead, man-on-man action is less meaningful than houseflies mounting each other before flapping their wings in search of even more mating partners.
After repeatedly moaning that no man will look at him twice, Usher finally finds someone with whom he hooks up in a scene as amorous as one rail car coupling with another.
Nonetheless, the man asks Usher to stay over and even offers to make him fish and grits the next morning. But rather than count his lucky stars, cuddle, and be happy, Usher gets dressed and skitters out the door.
So who really fuels Usher’s misery?
In another low point, Usher slams “black gays” for “using white men to flatter or elevate their f***ing class status.”
Wow! What an ice-hearted bitch-slap across the faces of mixed-race gay couples, from the orchestra seats to the balcony.
A Strange Loop reinforces stereotypes rather than challenging or erasing them. Gays are promiscuous, screaming queens who get AIDS. Blacks eat fried chicken. Christians thump their Bibles until their fingers bleed. With left-wing playwrights like this, who needs narrow-minded right-wing bigots?
This pageant of despair features skillful performances, not least that of Jaquel Spivey. He carries the show almost singlehandedly. He sings well, emotes movingly, and transforms himself at one point into a gospel-crooning reverend. His is a most-impressive Broadway debut.
The very spare set eventually grows into something more elaborate and visually appealing. And this show generates some laughs amid the preachy self-hatred and hate speeches.
But ultimately, this is a show without hope. Like Adaptation — Spike Jonze’s splendid 2002 film of Charlie Kaufman’s brilliant script — A Strange Loop is a self-reflective tale about the making of the very production that you, yourself, are watching.
Unlike Adaptation, this dramatic Mobius strip is loopy, but ultimately unsatisfying: Usher’s triumph remains ever-elusive. Presumably the anti-black, anti-gay, anti-fat, anti-ugly world of Broadway is just too hateful to let someone like him succeed. (And, as everyone knows, Broadway is America’s home of homophobia.) Never mind that you are sitting in the Lyceum Theater’s pricey seats, watching the very show that this wunderkind seemingly relegated to a box in the attic.
As the critical race theorists and gender-rights activists insist, we all are doomed to live in a dark, foreboding world so consumed with interlocking hatreds that America eventually will sink between two oceans of its own all-consuming prejudices.
The astute young actor who joined me on this occasion made this wise observation: A Strange Loop is a Smithsonian-grade depiction of the destination to which the Left has driven America in this show’s self-described setting: “Here and now.” That might explain why this clanging pageant of exhibitionist masochism won the Pulitzer Prize.