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The year is 2020. The United Kingdom formally withdraws from the European Union. The World Health Organization declares the outbreak of the COVID 19 virus to be a global pandemic. In the US high profile acts of excessive police violence against African Americans continue to rise, culminating in the callous murder of George Floyd, who dies after an officer kneels on Floyd's neck for almost 10 minutes. And Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay candidate to make a serious bid to become the presidential nominee for a major party, wins the Iowa caucuses for the Democrats and places second in their New Hampshire primary before bowing out of the race when he comes in fourth in South Carolina, where he endorses Joe Biden, who will go on to defeat Donald Trump. And in that year of 2020, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama went to Michael R. Jackson's A Strange Loop, a musical about a young black gay man trying to write a musical about a young black gay man who's trying to write a musical. A Strange Loop was only the 10th musical to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first by a black composer. My name is Jan Simpson. Welcome to all the Drama, a podcast about the plays and musicals that have won American theatre's highest accolade the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. This episode is a little different for me because first off, 2020 is just five years ago, and so many of you are already familiar with the story of A Strange Loop and its author. But it's also different because, as some of you may also know, I've had the privilege of serving as a Pulitzer juror three times, including in 2020. So I know what the discussions about that year's choices were like. But out of respect for the rules protecting the privacy of those deliberations, I can't share much about that. However, I can say that when the prize was announced, lots of people congratulated me for making such a great choice, even though I obviously wasn't the only one who'd been involved in making that choice. But I wasn't surprised by that response, because A Strange Loop seems to hit people viscerally very personally. And I suspect that's because although the musical isn't Strictly autobiographical. People can feel that in creating it, Jackson dug deep into his passions, his dreams and his fears. The musical's central character is a black gay musical theater writer named Usher, who's trying to figure out whether he can create a work that reflects his own interests and respects his artistic integrity while still appealing to a broad audience, or whether he should just write the kinds of shows that Tyler Perry does, even if Usher believes that they trade in stereotypes and pander to audiences. As this debate plays out, Usher is heckled by a Greek chorus of his innermost thoughts, who include the very loud and persistent daily self loathing. Jackson had worked on the show for nearly 20 years before playwrights Horizons gave it a shot, but he knew from a young age that he wanted to be a storyteller. He was born In Detroit in 1981, the second son of Henry Jackson, a police officer who eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant, and Mary Jackson, who worked in the accounting departments of local car companies like General Motors. When Michael was a kid, his grandaunt used to babysit for him, and during their times together, she introduced her young nephew to the afternoon soap operas she regularly watched. And he became devoted to them, too. He was a smart kid. And so Michael got into Cass Technical High School, a magnet school that had an ambitious academic program and a reputation for getting its graduates into top colleges. He began writing his own stories while at Cass Tech, modeling them after his favorite authors at the time, Jackie Collins and Stephen King. And after those soap operas he continued to watch and love. During that time, he also began to grapple with his sexuality, eventually coming out to his parents in a painful session in which he said all three of them cried. His mother told him that God hated homosexuality, and his father asked if being gay meant that Michael was attracted to him. They've all since made peace with his sexual identity, but during that time, Jackson found solace in a local program for young writers. There, his stories became more personal, particularly as he worked with the novelists Peter Marcus, who he says encouraged him to figure out what your obsessions are and write about them over and over and over again. Jackson took that advice with him when he went to NYU's Tisch School of the Arts to study playwriting with the hope that one day he would get a job on the writing staff for one of his beloved soap operas. His first full length effort at NYU was worthy of a soap opera. It was a play called DL, a title and premise he says he borrowed from an episode of Oprah Winfrey's show about black men. Who secretly engage in gay sex, doing it on the down low. As Jackson recalled in an essay he wrote years later, D.L. told the story of a black police lieutenant who had a secretly gay teenage son who was having an affair with one of his father's white officers. But as it turned out, that officer was also having a secret affair with the father. Jackson admits that the play wasn't very good, but he kept working at his craft, and he went on to get an MFA at Tisch. He'd gone back to school to develop skills as a book writer and lyricist for musicals, but he gradually began writing the music as well. He wasn't a complete novice when it came to music. He'd begun taking piano lessons at age 8. He later sang in a citywide choir that specialized in classical music, and he sang and played in church throughout his boyhood. But a real turning point in his relationship to music came when he was around 15 and a cousin gave him an album by the singer songwriter Tori Amos. Jackson instantly identified with Amos intimate songs about sexuality, politics and religion. He'd later say that he recognized her as a soulmate who expressed feelings he hadn't even known he had. He quickly began searching out and listening to other confessional singer songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Liz Phair. But it was an Amos song called Pretty Good Year that inspired the first song he wrote for his MFA class, which also ended up anchoring a significant moment in a strange loop and is my favorite song in the show. It's the haunting tune Memory Song, which chronicles the complex emotions of a young black gay man growing up in the church, knowing that it condemns homosexuality and seeing how that had destroyed other boys like him. Five foot four High school gyms Sneakin a cupcake these are my memories these are my memories Shooting hoops off the.