Full company; photo by Joan Marcus

Full company; photo by Joan Marcus

Company; photo by Joan Marcus

Full company; photo by Joan Marcus

None
Black and white portrait of playwright Michael R. Jackson, a black male, wearing a cardigan, checkered collared shirt, and glasses.

Michael R. Jackson; photo by Zack DeZon

Michael R. Jackson

Michael R. Jackson is one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people of 2022.His Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics Circle winning A Strange Loop (which had its 2019 world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in association with Page 73 Productions) received 11 Tony nominations in 2022, and was called "a full-on laparoscopy of the heart, soul, and loins" as well as a "gutsy, jubilantly anguished musical with infectious melodies" by Ben Brantley for The New York Times. In The New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham wrote, "To watch this show is to enter, by some urgent, bawdy magic, an ecstatic and infinitely more colorful version of the famous surreal lithograph by M. C. Escher: the hand that lifts from the page, becoming almost real, then draws another hand, which returns the favor."  In addition to A Strange Loop, he also wrote book, music and lyrics for White Girl in Danger. Awards and associations include: a New Professional Theatre Festival Award, a Jonathan Larson Grant, a Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, an ASCAP Foundation Harold Adamson Award, a Whiting Award, the Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, an Outer Critics Circle Award, a Drama Desk Award, an Obie Award, an Antonyo Award, a Fred Ebb Award, a Windham-Campbell Prize, a Dramatist Guild Fellowship and he is an alum of Page 73’s Interstate 73 Writers Group. 

Reviews
  • “A full-on laparoscopy of the heart, soul, and loins — A Strange Loop is a gutsy, jubilantly anguished musical with infectious melodies by the very deft Michael R. Jackson.”

    — Ben Brantley, The New York Times
  • “Exhilarating and wickedly funny. A triumph!”

    — Sara Holdren, New York Magazine