How the Pandemic Changed Theater
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In 2019, michael r. jackson's A Strange Loop was the first musical by a Black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play dramatizes the inner life of a queer Black musicaltheater writer named Usher, who works as an usher at a Broadway theater and is struggling to write his own metafictional musical. The other cast members personify his "Thoughts" as he wrestles with his dismal job, his creative ambitions, and his alternatingly loving and homophobic family.
Lileana Blain-Cruz is the current resident director of Lincoln Center Theater. Her directing credits include Anatomy of a Suicide at Atlantic Theater Company and Marys Seacole at LCT3, for [End Page 162] which she won an Obie Award. Blain-Cruz is currently directing Jackson's newest musical, White Girl in Danger, which excavates the experience of a young Black woman named Keesha living in a fictional "soap opera town" called Allwhite. After years of being relegated to the town's "Blackground," where she is forced to perform stock roles reserved for Black characters, Keesha refashions herself as a protagonist by appropriating the narratives of the white girls around her. White Girl in Danger, like A Strange Loop, juxtaposes bright, earwormy music with complex social commentary on race, gender, and representation.
Development of White Girl in Danger proceeded during the pandemic; throughout, Jackson and Blain-Cruz spoke extensively about unconventional narratives and the future of theater. In late August, over Zoom, the two artists discussed epic stories, the economics of working in theater, and their dreams for cultural change. Their conversation has been edited for style and clarity.
—the editors
I've been feeling particularly attuned to the idea of "liveness" after having lived inside a pandemic bubble alone for so long. What does it mean to be in the presence of other human beings in the midst of story? What stories are speaking to us right now, creating a reverberation of the spirit? If theater is a spiritual and a civic practice that requires an act of gathering, what are we gathering about? When the stakes of gathering now are so high—when doing so can actually risk death—then why am I really here? What is the importance of this story that needs to be told?
When I enjoy my experiences in the theater, I feel all those questions reverberating. When I walked into Playwrights Horizons to see A Strange Loop in 2019, my jaw dropped. It was two hours of being flooded and overwhelmed: by my sensory experience, my tracking of character and thought and argument, my emotions around family and relationships, my core desires and needs as a [End Page 163] human being. The musical posed this fundamental question: What does it mean to be an artist, to strive against seemingly impossible odds? What was truly remarkable about the show was watching a consciousness laid bare—completely uncensored, hilarious, ugly, messy, vulnerable—and in that exposure being also completely free. The ideals of liveness and theater activate us on all of those different levels of experience at once.
I feel so gratified to hear that said out loud. When I found out that I had the opportunity to do A Strange Loop at Playwrights Horizons in association with Page 73 Productions, I didn't know when I'd ever get the mic again to do something like it. Because who knows when there would be another opportunity to see a high-profile Black queer musical by a Black musical-theater writer? That doesn't happen all the time. If I and Stephen Brackett, Raja Feather Kelly, and Rona Siddiqui, the core creative team, were going to do it, we had to make it count. That meant taking nothing about the show or its production for granted. Usher's story had to be interrogated and rehearsed with open hearts and minds. We also had to be fearless about what the show was saying and doing at every turn.
Coming out of or continuing through the pandemic, my mission statement now is that life and time are...
