In ‘A Strange Loop’, HIV Stigma and Religion Are Intertwined – Them

Hi John-Michael! Can you first tell me a little bit about how you found A Strange Loop and came to be a part of it?

I had heard about it through the grapevine for a very long time. I don’t know how much you know about musical theater development, but sometimes they exist in this limbo state. Sometimes, they throw together these 29-hour readings, the audience is invite-only, dramaturgs, theater owners. I had heard about A Strange Loop, but I had never been invited to one of those readings. Fast forward to 2018, I got an offer from Playwrights Horizons, who was producing a reading of Loop. I was so excited, because I was like, “I guess they have this cast developed and they just need me to fill in.” So maybe I wasn’t invited to the reading, but I was like, yes yes yes!

Everyone there already knew the show because they had been developing it for two years and I was the new one in the family. We were working through it and I was having the experience the audience has every night in the theater. I’m sitting next to people, periodically weeping. I’m like, What is this musical?

That week goes beautifully, they make a few edits and a week or so later, I found out that they want to bring me back for the actual production, which would be happening at Playwrights Horizons the following summer. I was like, Oh my god, whoa! So honored. It was an immediate yes. This musical is so unique and it’s not every day you can say yes to something that is creatively daring and unique and fulfilling as a Black gay man.

You play one of Usher, the main character’s, Thoughts in the show, which requires you to bounce between multiple characters and attitudes. I’m just interested first and foremost in how you as an actor prepare for something like that?

This is our third production of it, so, the prep I’ll do tonight is different from the prep I did at the 29-hour reading, playing those characters for the first time. The first time I played Agent Fairweather, I was like, This is a person in his 60s, but [A Strange Loop creator and writer Michael R. Jackson] wanted him very young. It’s a lot of experimentation to discover who these people are. The anchor for me, at least, for developing all of these characters was remembering that it’s not a traditional play in that these characters are truly all different characters. I’m playing Usher, who is manifesting or projecting these different people in this life. Who knows who Agent Fairweather actually is? It ultimately didn’t matter. This is how Usher sees Agent Fairweather, so there’s a certain kind of authority I feel like I have with all of these mini characters. I don’t have to find the truth; I have to find the nightmare version in Usher’s mind. What’s the most annoying quality in Usher’s mind and how do I turn that up, since I am occupying that part of Usher’s mind?