How a Playwright Became One of the Most Incisive Social Critics of Our Time

In the summer of 2020, the playwright Michael R. Jackson received an unusual message from a fan of A Strange Loop, his musical about a gay Black man’s path to creative self-awareness through the process of writing a musical about a gay Black man’s path to creative self-awareness. “Can I buy you a bulletproof vest?” the fan inquired over Instagram.

Jackson, who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for A Strange Loop and lived on a perfectly safe street in Upper Manhattan, had no more conceivable use for body armor or handouts than the next man. He told me about the proposal several months ago, over steak frites at Soho House, stressing its absurdity and presumptuousness. “Ur life matters so much. Ur writing matters so much. This is the most available and direct way I can think of protecting ur life and ur future plays,” the fan had explained.

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In person, Jackson at first seems unassuming and even shy. He does not reflexively generate small talk. But he responds candidly and at length when asked a question about almost anything, and he is wickedly funny. In Jackson’s diagnosis, the fan in question was haplessly inspired by the racial reckoning then gripping the nation; he felt compelled to “show up” in the name of white allyship and anti-racism. Jackson compromised with his would-be savior: For the benefit of the latter’s conscience, he’d accept the vest’s cash value of $400. The man promptly sent this sum to Jackson via Venmo.

This bizarre exchange was emblematic of an entire constellation of assumptions, biases, and misunderstandings that has proliferated in recent years and altered the way Jackson thinks of himself, his work, and American society more broadly. “Once the pandemic and the protest began, I suddenly was like, Oh God. This is a test of all of our characters. This is the existential thing that none of us have actually lived through before,” he told me. He thinks the American elite failed that test, revealing the enormity of its disconnection from the real world.

Jackson can get animated when discussing the summer of 2020 and the way some artists, journalists, academics, and businesspeople exploited the killing of George Floyd to advance their career. “They’re like, ‘Oh, in the world where George Floyd is dead, we need to talk about our theater careers’—or academia, or whatever … It’s like, how can y’all just so casually use this man’s corpse to promote your bougie-ass class bullshit? It’s disgusting.” He found media coverage of this phenomenon to be particularly oblivious. “The New York Times theater section will say”—here he adopted a mock reporter’s voice—“ ‘Things changed after George Floyd was killed, and this artistic director was appointed to blah blah blah.’ ”

Jackson believes that social media, a gathering threat for many years, tore open our collective reality in 2020; it created “an alternate universe” in which identity-based suffering—or merely the claim to such, however implausible or vicarious—could be converted into social capital. “In the theater world in particular,” he said, “things got instantaneously even more dramatic because suddenly you had all these artists out of work. And all they had is the internet to do the most Shakespearean of performances about George Floyd and everything else. The number of people in the theater world who used George Floyd’s dead body to pivot to inequity in the theater world is the most hair-raising thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Many Black artists and thinkers, he said, live in this alternate universe: “They have made a home online where they can spread all of their influence and their clubbiness and cliquey-ness.” Here, the delusion that the lives of Black artists are urgently endangered can take on the false weight of conventional wisdom—and inspire a blessedly naive white man to believe that a Broadway writer is somehow in dire need of a bulletproof vest.

Jackson has long been preoccupied by questions of race and sexuality. He knows that he benefits from the interest generated by two of his identities, Black and gay. He also believes that the superficiality of that interest—the oversimplification of complex, ambiguous human reality—can create a stifling intellectual trap. The playwright Jeremy O. Harris told The New York Times in March that “theater is an act of community service.” But Jackson is wary of any social-justice consensus, which he believes encourages everyone “to look at art as a weapon to be used to get one’s way.”

I began a series of conversations with Jackson in the autumn of 2022, as A Strange Loop was winding down its Broadway run and he was preparing to launch, off-Broadway, his highly anticipated sophomore effort, an idiosyncratic satire called White Girl in Danger. He was also reaching beyond the theater world, writing for Boots Riley’s absurdist Amazon series, I’m a Virgo, which follows a 13-foot-tall Black teenager in Oakland, California. (It premiered in June 2023.) Now he is writing a horror movie—about, in his words, “the psychosis of an overeducated white and Black bourgeoisie”—for the production company A24. He’s also working on a new play, called Teeth, about a Christian teen in a religious community, which will open off-Broadway in March.

Thomas Chatterton Williams: You can’t define woke

Jackson is typically regarded as a member of the social-justice left in good standing—as “woke,” for lack of a better word. Yet such a reading of Jackson and his work is a projection that says far more about audiences and the critical climate than the artist himself. I immersed myself in both of Jackson’s plays, as well as his personal writing in published essays and on social media. And I became convinced that one of our era’s most surprising, ruthlessly self-aware, and incisive social observers just happens to write musicals.

Michael R. Jackson was born in 1981 in Detroit, into what he has described as an unexceptional middle-class setting, a “Black Mayberry” where “no one seemed to want anything and nothing of consequence ever seemed to happen.” His parents—“regular-ass Baby Boomers who have lived in the same house for 45 years”—are both southern transplants, his mother from Georgia and his father from Mississippi. “A lot of people think that being from Detroit means, like, ‘Oh, wow, you grew up in danger,’ ” he told me. “No, I grew up in a totally normal, regular neighborhood.” It was and still is a world of church outings and family reunions. A mostly Black world where “no one is talking about ‘I need to be seen, I need to be seen, I need to be seen—look, Mommy, I can see myself!’ They never say that … Their self-esteem is not managed by a digital world of digital managers and gatekeepers.”

If his family life was grounded and undramatic, his imaginative life was something like the opposite. When he was a very young child, his working parents would drop him off most days at his great-aunt’s house, where he would watch hours upon hours of daytime television: first cartoons, then game shows, and then, starting at lunchtime, soap operas. He recited the viewing order with relish: “12:30, The Young and the Restless ; 1 o’clock is Days of Our Lives ; 2 o’clock is Another World ; 3 o’clock is Santa Barbara.” Once he reached school age, Jackson would watch soaps on days off and over the summer, calling his great-aunt to catch up on missed plot developments. “It was this bond that we had over these stories, these fictional white people.” He said these shows and these people—“predominantly white women in peril”—taught him what the wider culture deemed important in storytelling.

Thomas Chatterton Williams: ‘Post-victimhood’ storytelling

At Cass Tech High School, Jackson studied creative writing and devoured Soap Opera Digest in his free time, fantasizing about becoming a writer on one of his favorite shows. The head of the English department encouraged him to participate in a program that brought professional writers into the school, including the novelist Peter Markus. Jackson studied privately with Markus. “He was the first adult in my life as an artist to challenge me to push the envelope,” he told me. “His whole thing was ‘Figure out what your obsessions are and write about them over and over and over again.’ ”

Markus advised Jackson to “stop imitating Maya Angelou” (Jackson’s words) and find his own perspective. Around this time, at the age of 15, Jackson began coming out as gay. And this emerging dual sense of his creative and sexual selves led him to want “to write dangerously and to step out of what I felt, in an abstract way, was this sort of box of being a Black writer who could only write about certain things and couldn’t be transgressive or emotional or whatever.”

Jackson has written frankly about his parents’ shock at his homosexuality and their subsequent acceptance. As he put it in a 2021 essay for The Yale Review:

For college, Jackson went to NYU, where his love of soap operas persisted, but he began to explore other dramatic forms as well. He interned on All My Children and took a playwriting class, where his teacher defined story for him: “A character wants something, is presented with obstacles, and either achieves, fails, or abandons it.” When Jackson attempted to write from his own perspective, however, the results were underwhelming.

His first full-length effort at NYU was a play called DL, “a title and premise I stole from an episode of Oprah about Black men with secret ‘down low’ gay sex lives,” he wrote in The Yale Review. “It was about a Black police lieutenant married to an outspoken southern born and raised accounting professional who had a secretly gay teenage son. The son was having a sexual affair with one of his father’s white subordinates, who was also having a secret sexual affair with the father. The play was not good.” It possessed the raw ingredients of something potentially powerful—identity, trauma, deception—but Jackson still did not know what to make of them or how to connect his characters’ desires and obstructions to a more compellingly universal narrative. “As a young artist,” he continues in the essay, “I was only interested in exploiting an unresolved familial conflict around my homosexuality and throwing it into a pot with whatever dramatic seasoning I could find in the cupboard.”

Jackson began work on what would become A Strange Loop after graduating from NYU, in 2002, when he was 21. After a short internship at ABC Daytime, he applied for an executive-assistant job at CBS Daytime but was turned down, so he went back to NYU for his M.F.A. in musical-theater writing. In grad school, he suffered a major heartbreak that sent him into a depression. He had unfulfilling sexual encounters that he funneled into his writing project. After he finished his degree, he kept writing. As his play—at the time titled Why I Can’t Get Work—expanded and evolved, he staged a few small performances. Sometimes people walked out. Even as the play progressed, he admitted to me, it periodically also got worse. His professional stagnation mingled with personal setbacks that sent him to therapy—a move he views as pivotal in preventing outright despair. All the while, he had mind-numbing day jobs, including as an usher at The Lion King and Mary Poppins. Much of A Strange Loop was born from that experience, of “just standing in the back of the theater watching people watch the show.” A Strange Loop was finally produced off-Broadway in 2019 and opened on Broadway in 2022, when Jackson was 41. He had worked on it for two decades.

A Strange Loop is both the show the audience has filed into their seats to watch and the play that its protagonist, Usher, an usher at The Lion King, is writing. Most of the action occurs in his overpopulated headspace, where a supporting cast of Thoughts, such as Your Daily Self-Loathing and Fairweather (Usher’s projection of his agent), badger Usher to hurry up and finish writing. The supporting characters also reenact significant moments from Usher’s past, including botched sexual encounters and the day he came out to his working-class parents in Detroit.

The relentlessly polyphonic interior monologue makes for a frenetic, hilarious 100 minutes. In awarding Jackson its annual prize for drama in 2020, the Pulitzer board called A Strange Loop “a metafictional musical that tracks the creative process of an artist transforming issues of identity, race, and sexuality that once pushed him to the margins of the cultural mainstream into a meditation on universal human fears and insecurities.”

The play is rooted in its creator’s personal experiences. Yet Jackson was also documenting his exposure to the larger political climate over the years. Specifically, toward the end of the Obama administration, “these conversations started to bubble up in the culture, and in the theater world particularly, about this thing called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion,’ ” which he had never really thought about before.

In 2015, Brett Ryback, a white actor and theater writer whom Jackson had met at a writing residency, published a blog post titled “Race and the New Generation of Musical Theatre Writers.” In it, Ryback noted the lack of diversity in the industry. His critique was aimed at the show Dear Evan Hansen, a hit that had been written by two of Jackson’s friends. Ryback “was just saying, ‘Why are the shows all white, and everything’s all white?’ And then he mentioned me,” Jackson said. The post was widely shared. “There are writers in this generation who are taking us in a different direction,” Ryback wrote. “People like Lin-Manuel Miranda and Michael R. Jackson, who also happen to be writers of color.” Jackson responded on his website, his first attempt to make sense of a debate he has returned to again and again:

In his response to Ryback, Jackson described his play-in-progress using conventional social-justice vernacular: “a piece that endeavors to force the hegemonic white gaze of the audience to lie dormant and see things as [Usher] sees things as a black, gay man.” A Strange Loop certainly contains traces of this progressive mindset, which, Jackson told me, “I no longer really align with, but I kept in because that’s where the character is.” But more than anything, the play reveals “a changing mind, a mind that is not static.”

Jackson cited one example of his previous way of thinking, from a speech Usher delivers to his father in which he earnestly declares, “Black lust matters,” the implication being that Black people ought to find their romantic completion in partners of the same racial background. “I’m not there anymore,” Jackson told me flatly, noting that even though he would love to spend his life with a Black man, he has come to realize that “the homogeneity of thought” he often finds within his social class can make this a challenge. “Nobody’s going to fuck you if you don’t have an ideology they can agree with,” he said. “Maybe five years ago, I rocked with this homogeneous thought. But I don’t anymore.”

A Strange Loop also contains within it the seeds of its own subversion. Consider this line delivered by one of Usher’s inner voices in the guise of a guard in musical-theater prison: “Give them niggas a lil’ slavery, police violence, and intersectionality,” the voice advises the young artist. Usher has a clear lane to relevance and success should he content himself with paint-by-numbers renditions of stereotypical Black life. But what would be the cost? “To me, that line is a Rorschach test for people,” Jackson told me. Is it skewering theatrical tastemakers, white audiences, or Black creators? Or all of the above? “How they interpret that line tells me what their lens on the whole piece is.”

Eight years after the Obama era, Jackson says he has only grown more attuned to what he sees as the superficiality of the contemporary racial-justice discourse. “They are not really saying what the implication of some of this stuff is,” he told me with exasperation, “because there’s a dark side to it.” For one thing, he detects the presumption that “quality is a white-supremacy structure, and that we could chuck it out the window in favor of conformity and of reallocating wealth.” Here he was alluding to DEI materials that have circulated widely in the past few years—such as the now-infamous anti-racist chart published on the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s website in the summer of 2020. These newfangled guidelines sought to deconstruct “aspects and assumptions of whiteness and white culture.” Some problematic white characteristics included “rational thinking,” “hard work,” and “meeting your goals.”

Jackson showed me a remarkable mission statement from the website of a DEI consultant who’d been hired by the Lyceum Theatre, in Midtown Manhattan, a rare example of saying the quiet part very loud: “To dismantle systemic oppression and usher in a new era of empathy by producing participatory action research, human resource initiatives and reallocating wealth to Black and Brown DEI consultants.” There is not even a glancing mention of artistic ambition or achievement.

Perhaps even more ridiculous, in Jackson’s view, is how a focus on surface-level diversity, equity, and inclusion can paradoxically stunt its beneficiaries artistically, even as it promotes their career. He expresses gratitude for the sheer amount of time he had to write and perfect A Strange Loop—an indispensable maturation process that he thinks many talented minority artists are being deprived of in society’s haste to discover and elevate nonwhite stories and voices. A play is not a blog post. During those long, lonely years that Jackson spent writing A Strange Loop, he was able to distance himself critically from his initial political beliefs and move beyond a purely polemical mode. By contrast, the effect of the recent professional fast-tracking, as he puts it, has been to emphasize the flash of political positions over the drudgery of creative development. “I’ve seen so many opportunities just handed out, doled out to all these people in the name of giving them these resources, but there’s nothing being done to help them develop and to make a quality product,” he said.

Not every work of art requires nearly two decades, but Jackson’s time investment in A Strange Loop made the play what it is: a rich palimpsest of viewpoints he’s recorded and effaced and written over again, arguments he’s waged against himself in all his previous iterations. This layeredness is one of the play’s great achievements; the vertiginous lack of authorial certainty constitutes a core strength.

Yet such layeredness can also be confounding to critics who now instinctively reduce works of art to political messaging. In a scathing review of A Strange Loop that ran in National Review in April 2022, for example, the writer Deroy Murdock dismissed Jackson’s play as mere “critical race theater” and quipped that it “could have been composed by Robin DiAngelo (mother of White Fragility) with lyrics by Ibram X. Kendi (father of How to Be an Antiracist).” Murdock argued that “seemingly everyone Usher encounters bashes his race, sexuality, weight, and looks” and charged that Usher’s Manhattan is, therefore, absurdly unrealistic. “Having lived on Manhattan Island since August 1987, I can attest that people here do not attack each other to their faces this way … This is 2022, not 1962.”

Such a reading gets things exactly backwards. The dramatic battleground here is not the white-supremacist, homophobic society into which Usher may be thrust but his infinitely more daunting and complicated mental terrain. His identity traits—overweight, Black, gay—are obstacles to his success in large part because he believes they are. One of Jackson’s points is that our experiences, however varied they may be, in some very meaningful way amount to what we make of them.

Conservative critics were not the only viewers led astray by the play’s racial cues. In the autumn of 2022, I attended a sold-out performance of A Strange Loop at the Lyceum Theatre. Several seats to my left, an older white man positively squealed with delight at every utterance of “nigger.” The man cracked up even when there was no evident punch line on the horizon. I wondered if Jackson had ever had anything like a Dave Chappelle moment. Explaining his sudden departure from his legendary sketch series on Comedy Central, Chappelle famously recalled the abnormally long, loud laughter of a single white spectator that had left him profoundly uncomfortable. “ My head almost exploded, ” he told Time magazine—he worried he was actually propping up the stereotypes he’d meant to critique.

When I asked Jackson what he thought about this possibility, his response was generous and more detached than I’d expected. “When you buy a ticket to something, you’re invited to have whatever experience you want,” he replied. But if the white man’s behavior was bizarre and discomfiting, maybe even racist, Jackson found other, more frequent reactions anathema to the old idea that art is for everyone. “There were these Black people who would run up to me and say, ‘This is for us. Thank you for telling our story. They don’t get it. They don’t get it. They didn’t know what they’re laughing at. They’re clapping along. They don’t know what they’re doing.’ And they’d want me to know that they know what it is.” He shook his head. “And then right after that, a white person will come up to me and go, ‘I know it’s not for me. I know it’s not for me. I know it’s not for me, but I loved it.’ They want me to know that they know that it’s not for them. And I just sort of have to calmly take all of that in, because this goes to the heart of the question: With all of this identity-marking and segregating and self-segregating and affinity groups and all these things, how do you know who is it for? If I wanted it to be for a group …” he trailed off. “When people tell me that it’s for us, that’s this weird thing where it seems like every Black person is the same.”

In conversation, Jackson repeatedly returns to the ways the evolving discourse around race, identity, and social justice fails to take into account the perspectives of flesh-and-blood Black people. Jackson’s best friend, Kisha, is a Black woman who runs a day-care center in South Carolina. The two of them talk constantly about how initially compelling concepts like intersectionality have turned into rhetorical class markers. “So many of these [concepts] don’t have any practical applications to anybody’s actual lives,” he told me. “I bet you a garbageman has never had to do a diversity training,” he said. “This only operates at a certain class level.” Jackson said his mother—one of eight children, who left the Deep South, moved to the North, held down a job, raised a family, made a home—“would never call herself a feminist, let alone an intersectional one.” Yet she is “one of the most powerful Black women I know.” The issue, as he sees it, boils down to the fact that more school is always required to make use of these terms, or even to understand them, and as a result they’re deeply exclusionary. “You have to read more … It’s endless working and reading and studying,” he said. “I feel like there’s a scam inside of it that’s meant to keep some people on top and some people on bottom.” He went on, “It’s all about these social-class associations, and you either have entrance into this country club or you don’t, based on whether you subscribe to a kind of thought or belief system.”

While still fine-tuning A Strange Loop, Jackson was also plotting a new show, one that would abandon inward-looking theatrical autofiction in favor of a more outward-looking critique. His second play, White Girl in Danger, is set in the realm of daytime television, and marks an attempt to bring his cultural observations to the stage—“to put on a canvas a sort of picture of a world that melodramatizes itself daily.” Jackson’s allegory is ingenious: The American racial drama has become one giant, insular soap opera.

One afternoon last March, I watched a rehearsal of White Girl in Danger at the Tony Kiser Theater, in Midtown Manhattan. Jackson was sitting by himself, polishing off a Shake Shack hamburger in a neon-pink T-shirt emblazoned with the faces of Viki and Niki from One Life to Live. Recently back to work after attending the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles (“They don’t feed you; there was no food for 10 hours”) and The New York Times’ annual op-ed party (“Eric Adams is sexy”), he was surprisingly relaxed and easygoing, considering the expectations following A Strange Loop, which, in addition to the Pulitzer, had won the Tony Award for Best Musical.

His stage director, Lileana Blain-Cruz, swept into the room. She organized the cast and crew into an “energy circle.” A series of deep-breathing exercises quickly evolved into a dance-off as each member, including Jackson, rapped and produced a novel movement for the dozens of participants to emulate. When the circle split up, the musicians took their seats, and the cast broke into subgroups, preparing to run through specific scenes in the second act of the three-hour production.

“If you are white, please leave my space!” announced the choreographer, Raja Feather Kelly, to much laughter. Brown-skinned members of the cast began marching in circles chanting, “Blackground matters!” while the pale-complexioned actors retreated into an imaginary town called Allwhite and retorted, “Allwhites matter!” “You’re not Allwhite, you bitch! I’m Allwhite!” the actor Alyse Alan Louis screamed several times, before settling on the proper enunciation.

“This is DEI theater!” Kelly shouted with a smile. Jackson asked me if I’d been following the recent Roald Dahl controversy, in which members of the British author’s literary estate decided to posthumously cleanse certain texts, removing words like fat and ugly. “I don’t believe anyone actually cares about these words,” Jackson said. People, he said, are “just exerting power.”

The exertion of power—over others, over oneself, to surmount obstacles and chart a unique destiny, to “choose your own adventure,” so to speak—is an issue very much at the core of White Girl in Danger. In the soap-opera universe of Allwhite, a trio of white girls, Meagan, Maegan, and Megan, are all threatened by a serial killer who stalks their suburban town, depositing bodies in the surrounding woodland. Meanwhile, the girls deal with—among other afflictions—body-image issues, awful boyfriends, domineering mothers, and, of course, white privilege. One typical line, which had stayed with me since Jackson had first sung it to me months earlier, goes, “She doin’ drugs, but she won’t do her homework!” Whiteness, Jackson playfully suggests, can provoke the need to invent struggles that the world has otherwise failed to provide.

Their world is contrasted with the constricted second-class milieu of the nonwhite characters, most notably the spectacular mother-daughter duo of Nell and Keesha. The pair, thanks to an enigmatic and omnipotent Allwhite writer—a kind of Oz figure within the play—are doomed to toil and dwell in the “Blackground.” Here, identities are always contingent, ordered off a prix fixe menu: best friends, slaves, custodians, victims of police brutality. Jackson also suggests—as the keenest observers of American life never fail to do—that the white world might be even more mass-produced and lacking in originality by dint of its privilege. His white characters are stereotypes too; they just lack the self-awareness to do anything about it.

The engine of the story, which is teeming with jokes and inside jokes, critiques and self-critiques, as well as esoteric allusions, is Keesha’s desire to transcend the confines of the Blackground by securing her own autonomous plotline. When an Allwhite girl is killed by “the Allwhite killer,” the Allwhite writer announces that the role of best friend will henceforth be filled by Keesha. But she is no longer content as the sidekick. Keesha maneuvers to steal her Allwhite friends’ storylines, seducing their boyfriends in the process. As she becomes more successful, racking up ever juicier subplots, her hair turns blond and the Allwhite writer puts her in the killer’s crosshairs. The revelation of the killer’s identity, as well as that of the Allwhite writer, comes as a surprise. But the basic story here is as old as the Black experience in America: what happens when an ambitious individual belongs to a marginalized group, yet refuses the arbitrary limitations that come with their identity. This play also suggests, more coyly and controversially, that there can be real power in the victim posture. Keesha learns to manipulate her identity for personal advancement, becoming a kind of predator who feasts on the Allwhite writer’s indulgence.

White Girl in Danger is far stranger and more sui generis than I’d anticipated when I first began talking with Jackson—and he is even more seriously interested in soap operas than I’d initially gathered. Watching all three hours of the musical felt physically demanding to the point that, post-intermission, I wondered if the play’s form mirrored its content: American racial dynamics are literally exhausting. Of course Jackson knows this. He also knows that this show is even more vulnerable to misinterpretation than his previous one. “I think there’s a way in which people could look at the show and go, ‘This is an anti-woke musical,’ ” he told me. “But actually, I think of it as a musical that is a multiple-personality battle between woke and anti-woke. I have many targets, but I try, as much as I target them, to also have compassion for them.”

From the March 2023 issue: Thomas Chatterton Williams on the French panic over le wokisme

Contrary to Kelly’s self-aware quip in rehearsal, White Girl in Danger is decidedly not “DEI theater.” It is certainly inclusive of Black actors, stories, and perspectives. But it doesn’t strictly adhere to or advance any particular contemporary political position: The “Special Thanks” part of the program cites, among other influences, “PC/un-PC/woke/anti-woke” storylines. This characteristic irreverence and anti-clubbishness is what makes Jackson such an incisive cultural commentator as well as an uncompromising artist.

White Girl in Danger’s off-Broadway run ended quickly, after only 10 weeks. Audiences weighing in on social media tended to express exasperation and bewilderment. Ordinarily, the next goal for such a musical would be Broadway, but the show is still “very long and very expensive and got mixed-to-negative reviews—from the few I read, which was admittedly very few,” Jackson told me. “It’s possible it could have a regional life if I made some edits to make it a bit shorter and thus easier and less expensive to produce, but that would necessitate a whole process to develop that version that still had the integrity and vision I refuse to relinquish.” Significant changes have affected the theatrical landscape since the pandemic, most noticeably a lack of appetite for artistic risk in general, let alone when the perspective on race is so unorthodox. “Being ultimately a Black show that pushes unique boundaries in its message and nuance in the current sociopolitical climate also challenges its economic viability,” Jackson suggested, while holding out the possibility of developing White Girl in Danger for film or TV. In the meantime, he has recorded an album with the cast.

On the night I saw White Girl in Danger, Jackson seemed preoccupied with and possibly nervous about the question of whether people would get it. He may have genuinely been worried about being canceled, which he’d joked about in rehearsal. But when I met him several weeks later at Soho House, he was loquacious and relaxed, carrying a copy of Black Bourgeoisie, E. Franklin Frazier’s 1957 analytical work, whose paperback tagline reads: “The book that brought the shock of self-revelation to middle-class blacks in America.” Frazier’s thesis holds that the Black bourgeoisie is “a class in search of a mission,” alienated from the white mainstream in addition to lower-class Black reality. “Cold, hard facts!” Jackson said, placing it on the table. He is not finished trying to hold a mirror to his own moment, and he isn’t finished laughing about it either, though the only detail he would reveal on the subject of his horror-movie script is that he finds it “terrifying.”

That night at Soho House, I mentioned my love of the character Nell in White Girl in Danger, who is a tremendous assortment of familiar and surprising Black female roles played to such effect by Tarra Conner Jones that she steals the show repeatedly. In an email, she told me that she was initially struck by “Michael’s audacity to be so bold and truthful about how black people experience, and are experienced in, a white world.” But ultimately, she just “laughed out loud a lot because the script was funny as hell.” Perhaps the most brilliant idea embedded in White Girl in Danger is that the way out of the loopy national melodrama will necessarily rely on humor. To this, Jackson replied that what he’s really interested in now is just giving actors—and, by extension, audiences—the space to laugh at themselves.

“Everything is not always about the legacy of slavery.”

This article appears in the March 2024 print edition with the headline “The Radical Self-Awareness of Michael R. Jackson.”  When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.