6660 Manasota Key Road
Englewood
FL 34223
“Michael R. Jackson: Just Sittin’ Here Lookin’”
with Hermitage Fellow & 2020 Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael R. Jackson
Friday, May 21st @ 6:30pm
Presented in partnership with Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe
LIVE @ The Hermitage Beach
6660 Manasota Key Road, Englewood, FL 34223
Also available via live-stream.
It’s been a helluva year and Michael R. Jackson has just been “sittin’ here lookin’,” as his grandma used to say, holed up in his tiny New York City apartment during a hurricane of political, cultural, and epidemiological upheaval – and way too much social media! The music within him has largely been suppressed during this time, but now a lot is coming up, and as he joins us live on the Hermitage Beach sharing music and stories, Jackson might just need somebody to hold his hair back!
Michael R. Jackson is a 2021 Hermitage Fellow and the recipient of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics Circle winning musical A Strange Loop (which had its 2019 world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in association with Page 73 Productions) was called “a full-on laparoscopy of the heart, soul, and loins” and a “gutsy, jubilantly anguished musical with infectious melodies” by Ben Brantley for The New York Times. In The New Yorker, Vinsom Cunningham wrote, “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.” In addition to A Strange Loop, Jackson also wrote book, music, and lyrics for White Girl in Danger. Awards and associations include the New Professional Theatre Festival Award, a Jonathan Larson Grant, a Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, an ASCAP Foundation Harold Adamson Award, a Whiting Award, the Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, an Outer Critics Circle Award, a Drama Desk Award, an Obie Award, an Antonyo Award, a Fred Ebb Award, and a Dramatist Guild Fellowship. Jackson is an alum of Page 73’s Interstate 73 Writers Group.
Michael R. Jackson’s Hermitage Artist Residency generously sponsored by the Huisking Foundation.