That music, it gave me a real outlet to really start questioning a lot of what I was raised with and under and around and feeling like it was okay to be a weirdo within my identity category. I was like a Black boy raised up in a Baptist Church, hearing that being gay is bad and you're going to go to hell and AIDS and all that stuff. God, sometimes you just don't come through. The way he ordered her thoughts, the vulnerability, the sexuality, talking about religion because then the next song goes, Even though it was her life, it wasn't really about me, but there was something about the way she approached her feelings and her thoughts. I was in my most angst-ridden place I could have been as a teenager and this red-haired piano-playing white woman just was reading me for filth. I was like, "Oh, it's on." It was something about that just reached into my soul. I turned off the lights, put on my headphones, pressed play on the disc man, and then the first thing I hear is,
One night when I was about 15, I decided to listen to Under the Pink. What he brought back was the album Under the Pink and Little Earthquakes by Tori Amos, who for whatever reason he thought I might enjoy it.
Then within that, my cousin Zanita had gone to Innerleithen and then he got kicked out. All of that was very much a part of my world as a kid and growing up. That music like Motown Sound, Philadelphia Sound, all of that stuff was in gospel music. My parents grew are like children of the '50s and '60s and '70s. I will say first that I grew up in Detroit, Michigan, Motown. Do you think that they had a great or at least a galvanizing influence on your writing music and lyrics? Hilton Als: You shared with me off radio as it were, your very early love of people like Tori Amos and Linda Ronstadt and all those girls who can sing as they say, but also writing songs that mattered to you a great deal. One lone black gay boy I knew who chose to turn his back on the Lord Of one lone black gay boy, I knew who chose to turn his back on the Lord Hilton Als: How long was the process between that monologue and you reaching the stage at Playwrights Horizon? The song that came out of that was the song Memory Song which would end up being the penultimate song in A Strange Loop. I decided to try my hand finally at writing my own song. I went to grad school about nine months later. Just reflecting on lots of whatever was going on in the world at that time. I started writing this monologue that was about a young Black gay man walking around New York wondering why life was so terrible. America was about to go to war with Iraq and I was just like just this little Black gay boy sitting upstairs in this old lady's house. My student loans were coming due and my parents wanted to know what I was going to do with my life. I was like, "What am I going to do? I don't know what to do." I just lived upstairs in this bungalow-style house. Then you take a bus from the train to get to her house. Then I moved into the little lady's house in Jamaica Queens all the way at the last stop on the e-train and the f-train. My friend Keisha had been living in this little lady's house in Jamaica Queens and she got a live-in nanny job in Tribeca. Jackson: I studied at NYU in the Dramatic Writing Program. At the time I was about 22, 23 years old and I was just very uncertain of my place in the world and where I would go with a BFA degree. Jackson: It started as a monologue initially that I wrote in between graduating from undergrad playwriting and going to grad school for musical theater writing. I wanted to ask you for the folks out there, what was the genesis of you writing a play about a gay musical theater playwright working as an usher, talking about his life while trying to write a musical about AIDS and among other things. There's just been nothing like it, Michael. Hilton Als: One of the things that is so extraordinary about this show is that we have never seen anything remotely like it on stage or in a book or in a movie. Staff writer Hilton Als talk with Michael R. Usher sings about the terror of the blank page and the terrors of dating and sex and all in terms that are quite frank, which we'll hear in some of the clips played in this interview, just so you're aware. He's a Black queer writer who is writing a musical about a Black queer writer who is writing about a Black queer writer. A Strange Loop is about a man named Usher who also happens to work as an usher. It begins its run on Broadway this month. His musical A Strange Loop won the Pulitzer prize in 2020. Jackson, a 41-year-old composer in playwright. Host: Michael, oh my God, you're on Broadway.