A Strange Loop review

Oh boy did I, a straight, white male in his 30s, pick a doozy for my Stage Today debut. A Strange Loop is Michael R Jackson’s semi-autobiographical (or self-referential as is Jackson’s preferred term) reflection on the inner self of a young queer black man from a strict Christian family. To say I am unqualified to pass judgment on this deeply personal, introspective stream of consciousness from a creator whose experiences are as far from my own as Pluto is from the Sun would be something of an understatement. At least the protagonist and I have similar struggles with weight.

A Strange Loop follows Usher (both in name and profession), a theatre-loving homosexual who fled his family home where God is gospel and gospel is God for New York City where he was hoping to find a more natural habitat for his theatrical ambitions. Turns out all he found was debilitating rejection and humiliating compromises. The infuriating experiences he endures cumulate in one of the most vibrant and explosive expressions of fury ever performed on stage.

This is not your usual, safe gay compromise. All of the hesitations and pandering engineered to make hetero audiences feel comfortable with gay material do not exist for the hour and 40 minutes A Strange Loop takes to complete. Neither do the hesitations and pandering engineered to make white audiences feel comfortable with black material. From the second the opening number, Intermission Song, begins the audience will be the subject of a relentless assault on the senses. They will be taken on a tour of a world that wants to both commoditise Usher’s fresh perspective and dismiss the traumas that came with developing that same perspective.

Your guides on this tour are the elements of Usher’s own psyche. A Greek chorus of thoughts and feelings that constantly bombard Usher with reminders as to his own marginalisation from both the dominant culture of white patriarchy, and his conflicting minority roots of Caucasian-dominated homosexuality and Black evangelical Christianity. One of the thoughts, his Supervisor of Sexual Ambivalence, ensures he is always more aware of the reasons not to have sex with someone than the reasons it might be good or even pleasurable for him. His self-loathing becomes almost an antagonist of the show. You may seriously be tempted to rush the stage and punch anyone who speaks to Usher the way his subconscious speaks to himself.

Usher doesn’t feel like a protagonist in the classic sense of the word because that term demands the world be forged by the hero’s actions. In A Strange Loop, it often feels like it’s Usher being hammered into shape by the world. He’s rejected by his own sex dreams, he submits to an ‘Alpha’ male wanting to be his slave owner daddy, and he is pressured into writing a gospel musical like Tyler Perry because Tyler knows how to write for a black audience and make money at the same time. A combination we’re led to believe is unicorn-like in its rarity. Each one of these and more comes to our hero like a baseball bat to the gut.

Kyle Ramar Freeman’s performance as Usher becomes more furious with each indignity, the power of his vocals rising throughout the show until the final climactic confrontation with those who represent his most contentious relationship. It is an intense, intelligent performance by an actor with the confidence and wisdom not to just recite Jackson’s thesis but to truly understand its meaning, its complexity and even its confusion. Freeman’s Usher is vulnerable and curious, still finding his way in the world but with enough confidence to stand his ground in the parts of his identity he has staked his claim to.

A Strange Loop is an uncompromising look at a young man coming to terms with his identity, both the parts he has chosen and the parts that chose him. It doesn’t make the concessions other works that touch on this material have made and it is a richer experience for it. Other examinations on queerness (especially ones engineered by straight people) dare only to be a gateway drug to LGBTQIA+ issues. They barely allow any physical contact between their gay characters, never getting past a puritanical closed-mouth kissing stage. They’re allowed to be awkward and frustrated, and if they’re lucky they get one allocated outburst of rage per film, one which they are expected to quickly apologise for afterwards, lest we straights start losing our patience.

A Strange Loop makes no apologies. It is explosive in its anger, and isn’t afraid to call out any obstacles that stand in the way of Usher’s acceptance or happiness, even if those obstacles are sat in the audience. And as for the physicality, let’s just say Usher gets beyond the kissing stage. You see, even I won’t dare say what they get up to so you can imagine just how far the performance goes.

A Strange Loop is an exercise in brutal honesty and as an audience, we should be thankful for that. That we’re not being mollycoddled by material that is walking on eggshells around our precious preconceptions of what gay and black people should behave and sound like. Material that enriches us instead of reinforcing our already warped notions of race and sexuality. But that also wraps up some deeply harrowing concepts with a musical that is clearly in love with musicals. That is as joyous as it is terrifying. That has deeper and denser harmonies than a show with a cast twice as big and ten times as expensive could ever pull off. With numbers that don’t get stuck in your head, they get stuck in your soul.  A Strange Loop, like Usher himself, is a gift only those who deserve it will accept.

A Strange Loop is playing at the Barbican until Sat 9 Sep 2023.