Navel-gazing becomes a highly invasive procedure — a full-on laparoscopy of the heart, soul and loins — in Michael R. Jackson’s “A Strange Loop,” which opened on Monday at Playwrights Horizons. This jubilantly anguished musical burrows so deep into the shadows of its hero’s tormented mind that you wonder if it will ever emerge into the light.

Spoiler alert: It doesn’t.

Mr. Jackson, a young playwright and composer whose considerable talent is evidently matched by feelings of endless frustration, has created a show that would appear to be all about him, and it’s anything but a valentine. But let’s allow Usher (a commandingly centered Larry Owens), the work’s central (and arguably only) character, to describe it himself:

“It’s about a black, queer man writing a musical about a black, queer man who’s writing a musical about a black queer man who’s writing a musical about a black queer man, etc.”

Or to locate the subject more specifically (and bear with me here), he’s “a young overweight-to-obese homosexual and/or gay and/or queer, cisgender male, able-bodied university-and-graduate-school educated, musical theater writing, Disney Ushering, broke-ass middle-class far left-leaning black-identified and classified American descendant of slaves full of self-conscious femme energy and who thinks he’s probably a vers bottom but not totally certain of that obsessing over the latest draft of his self-referential musical ‘A Strange Loop’!” Read more via NYT