Jackson relishes the playfulness at work in these kinds of appropriations, and the show bristles with references as varied as Bravo’s “Real Housewives” franchise the writing of bell hooks Dan Savage, the advice columnist “Hamilton” Stephen Sondheim. The title carries its own layers of reference: to Liz Phair’s 1993 song “Strange Loop” and to the work of Douglas Hofstadter, the scholar of cognitive science and comparative literature.
In his 1979 book “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,” Hofstadter coined the term “a strange loop” to describe the recursive nature of selfhood and intelligence. Jackson is dead set against contemporary virtuousness: a puritanical need for fixed, context-repellent delineations of right and wrong. The show is a product of Jackson’s own vicissitudinous loops: his fits and starts of success and failure, when he was working, for five years, as an usher at “The Lion King” and “Mary Poppins” while revising his own play over and over and over again, trying not to give up. Jackson says that the show is not autobiographical but “self-referential,” though the parallels between him and his protagonist are striking. (In the memory palace of his mind, his relatives are named for “Lion King” characters: His mother and father are called Sarabi and Mufasa, his niece is Nala, his ne’er-do-well brother is Scar.) He “writes stories and songs and wants desperately to be heard.” The story concerns Usher ( played with vulnerability, charm and delicacy by Jaquel Spivey), a 25-year-old “fat American Black gay man of high intelligence, low self-image and deep feelings.” Like his creator, Usher works as an usher for “The Lion King” and shares his name with a pop star. Usher is trying to develop his own musical - about a Disney usher who’s writing an original musical about an usher who’s writing a musical, and so on - as he deals with the impositions of his mind, which are personified as six Greek-chorus-like “Thoughts” who voice his desires and cutting internal commentary. Senior old chubby gay men jerking off download#.