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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 4, 2021 |  CONTACT: Corinna Schulenburg, cschulenburg@tcg.org, 212-609-5941

New from TCG Books:

NEW YORK, NY – Theatre Communications Group (TCG) is pleased to announce the publication of A Strange Loop by Michael R. Jackson. The musical received its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in New York in the summer of 2019.

“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. Which came first? A Strange Loop is complex, teasing, thrilling.” —Vinson Cunningham, New Yorker

Usher is a Black, queer writer, working a day job he hates while writing his original musical: a piece about a Black, queer writer, working a day job he hates while writing his original musical. This blistering musical follows a young artist at war with a host of demons—not least of which are the punishing thoughts in his own head—in an attempt to understand his own strange loop.

“Brilliant… Harrowing…one-of-a-kind… Hyper-observant and hyper-verbal, Jackson lets his remorselessly satirical eye wander, to hilarious and devastating effect…What makes A Strange Loop so powerful, is not an attempt to find ‘our common humanity’ but an insistence on speaking its own idiosyncratic truth.” —Adam Green, Vogue

Michael R. Jackson holds a BFA and MFA in playwriting and musical theater writing from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. His awards include the Jonathan Larson Grant, a Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, a Whiting Award, and a Hull-Warriner Award. A Strange Loop is Michael’s professional debut. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2020.

Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national organization for theatre, leads for a just and thriving theatre ecology. Since its founding in 1961, TCG’s constituency has grown from a handful of groundbreaking theatres to over 700 Member Theatres and affiliate organizations and over 7,000 Individual Members. Through its programs and services, TCG reaches over one million students, audience members, and theatre professionals each year. TCG offers networking and knowledge-building opportunities through research, communications, and events, including the annual TCG National Conference, one of the largest nationwide gatherings of theatre people; awards grants and scholarships to theatre companies and individual artists; advocates on the federal level; and through the Global Theater Initiative, TCG's partnership with the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, serves as the U.S. Center of the International Theatre Institute. TCG is North America’s largest independent trade publisher of dramatic literature, with 18 Pulitzer Prizes for Drama on the TCG booklist. It also publishes the award-winning American Theatre magazine and ARTSEARCH®, the essential source for a career in the arts. TCG believes its vision of “a better world for theatre, and a better world because of theatre” can be achieved through individual and collective action, adaptive and responsive leadership, and equitable representation in all areas of practice. TCG is led by executive director and CEO Teresa Eyring and deputy director and COO Adrian Budhu. https://circle.tcg.org/ 

A Strange Loop

By Michael R. Jackson

120 pages

December 2020

$15.95

Paperback

978-1-55936-993-0

eBook

978-1-55936-994-7

TCG books are exclusively distributed to the book trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, an Ingram Brand. Phone orders: 866-400-5351. Individuals may call 212-609-5900 or visit our online bookstore at www.tcg.org. For postage and handling, please add $6.50 for the first book and $1.00 for each additional copy.