Michael R. Jackson and Jacolby Satterwhite on Making Art in a Shifting Culture
nytimes.comAlthough the playwright Michael R. Jackson, 41, and the visual artist Jacolby Satterwhite, 36, work in different genres, they have some things in common.
Both are queer Black New York-based artists who address trauma, secrets and stigmas. And both have spent most of their careers feeling overlooked and misunderstood. “As the Black gay man in the room,” said Satterwhite, “I was seen as some sort of weird exception and dismissed.” Yet since the summer of 2020 and its global protests against racial discrimination and violence, both men have been enthusiastically embraced by the public. “A Strange Loop,” Jackson’s meta-musical about a queer Black man trying to write a musical, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making its author the first Black writer to win the award for a musical.
The production moved to the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway two years later and was nominated for 11 Tony Awards, including that for Best Musical (which it won).
Next spring, Jackson’s new musical, “White Girl in Danger,” set in the world of a fictional soap opera town called Allwhite, will open off Broadway.
