by Lee Seymour
After weeks of dispiriting press releases and grim cancellations, Theater Twitter was positively buoyant Monday afternoon as Michael R. Jackson (no relation) received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his musical A Strange Loop.
“It’s like all the holidays rolled into one,” tweeted Jamie DuMont, who hosts the Broadway podcast The Fabulous Invalid.
“It’s honestly the most I’ve seen my timeline rejoice collectively in two months,” agreed Casey Mink, senior writer at Backstage Magazine. Many others followed suit, most in terms too joyfully explicit to print here. The adulation speaks both to the industry’s support of the young writer, who’d been developing the show for over a decade, and also its doubly historic status in the Pulitzer canon.
Jackson’s win marks the first time the committee has awarded a black writer for a musical. (A Strange Loop is the tenth musical to take home the prize, following such hits as Hamilton and Rent). That’s particularly poignant given the material itself: a discursive meta-tale about a young, gay, black musical theater writer, who’s writing a musical about a young, gay, black musical theater writer, and so on down the rabbit hole.
(Jackson himself refers to the show as self-referential, not autobiographical, as he does not appear in it. The lead, named Usher, is played by powerhouse Larry Owens). Read more via Forbes