Review: ‘A Strange Loop’ Gracefully Explores Issues of Queer, Black Identity
9 / 10
A Strange Loop is profanely funny and courageously raw, but on a second viewing (I reviewed its world premiere Off Broadway in 2019), it's also claustrophobically fixated on the wounds of youth, a howl of rage at gay lookism, white gatekeepers, and toxic Christianity. All those targets deserve to be howled down to hell. But Jackson is 41 years old; his avatar is identified as 26. That's a telling gap, one that permits a rebel's outrage rather than a middle-aged artist's mellower view. The lack of self-awareness combined with merciless self-examination comes to a bathetic head when Thought #1 says, '[it's not about] Tyler or your parents or anybody else. And as scary as this world might seem, all of this ugliness ... this pain and anger...is about you. So how about you focus on yourself?' Which is rich after 90 minutes of Usher running screaming around his hall of mirrors.
