A Strange Loop, which won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama - “I was surprised that they made the right choice,” Jackson says - opens with the promise that “There will be butt-fucking!” And its young, fat, queer, Black theater-queen aspiring-playwright protagonist, Usher (yes, he works as an usher), who’s writing a musical (yes, called A Strange Loop), certainly wants to have gay sex and feels like something is wrong with him for not having it, but the promised butt-fucking, when it appears, is not something anybody wants. Obviously he’s hoping the ticket buyers for Broadway musicals, who trend white, heterosexual, and in from out of town, are at least … curious. “Where’s the counterculture? Where’s the danger? Where’s the excitement? Like, to say, ‘I’m gay. It’s just a few nights before his “Big Black Queer Ass American Broadway Show,” A Strange Loop, was to open across the street at the Lyceum Theater, and though the musical is maybe the gayest thing I’ve ever seen on Broadway, Jackson has clearly not spent much time lately on the gay nightlife circuit. Jackson asks me, picking at a bowl of unusually orange bang bang shrimp at the nearly deserted Bobby Van’s Steakhouse on 45th Street. “I’ve been having this ongoing debate with myself. Jackson on opening night of A Strange Loop.
