Addressing the audience as his congregation, Jacob Ming-Trent tells us upfront that the story he is about to relate – how a Black, fat, unloved, homeless high school dropout stumbled onto the Bard and vowed to become a Shakespearean actor — is not autobiographical. “This show is testimony,” he says. (Huh?)
And it’s only a one-man show because there was no money to hire anybody else, not even a DJ, and just enough in the budget for a church pew as the sole set. (Alexander V. Nichols’ elaborate projection design, Jake Rodriguez’s original music and Alan C. Edwards’s intense lighting didn’t cost anything?)
From the get-go, “How Shakespeare Saved My Life,” opening tonight as a production of Red Bull at the Public Theater, might make one wonder how much to take what Jacob Ming-Trent says literally. And this is before an elaborate scene that begins with a crowd chasing Jacob down the street, shouting “You should play Othello!,” which attracts the police, who arrest him and throw him in jail, alongside a cellmate who is a prostitute and a drag queen, yet happens to recite Shakespearean verse impeccably from memory, explaining “I’m an expert on every book the Western World has used to oppress me: The Bible, Shakespeare, Harry Potter.”
In other words, “How Shakespeare Saved My Life” offers more than a touch of whimsy as well as a dip into the surreal.
What is undeniably real is Ming-Trent’s infectious energy and humor, which he firmly established as a performer in Broadway musicals (Gypsy, Shrek) and yes, as a Shakespearean actor, most notably in “Merry Wives” at the Delacorte in 2021. His new show features a generous supply of Shakespeare’s verse, along with some original raps, as he exuberantly imparts what is probably a mix of tall tales and true tales —sometimes hard to tell apart, not least because both are so engaging.
It was on the day that his mother kicked his father out of the house for being an addict (so he claims), that 16-year-old Jacob walked into the wrong classroom in his high school in Pittsburgh and overheard a classmate recite the speech from Coriolanus: “You banish me? Nawwwww, I banish you! Thus I turn my back: there is a woooooorld elsewhere.”
Jacob is smitten.
” i said oh shit, I imagined speaking to the principal after he suspended me from school… ‘You suspend me? Nawwwww, I suspend you! There is a schoooool for me elsewhere!’”
This is how he typically uses Shakespeare in his play – less often for enlightenment than entertainment. Young Jacob employs the Bard’s poetry to get out of – and into – trouble. He loses his virginity, he tells us, by wooing a girl with Valentine’s soliloquy from Two Gentlemen from Verona (“What light is light, if Sylvia be not seen?..”), which he dramatizes with a volunteer from the audience (the wooing part.) It might be worth noting that I’m the one giving the citations for these monologues; the characters (mostly Jacob) usually just launch into a passage without prologue or source.
It was coming home at 2 a.m from his moment of post-virginal bliss that his mother cited as the reason to kick him out of the house; her real reason, he says she told him later, was that she was remarrying, and was afraid Jacob’s presence would jeopardize what she felt was her last chance at love.
Shortly afterwards, his high school English teacher sends him to Detention for reading “The Merchant of Venice” in class and not the class assignment, “ Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (“The quality of mercy is not strained…. Open thy gates of mercy, Ms. Jackson” he pleads with her, to no avail.) Then, when his physics teacher tells the class they’ll be miserable for six months but it will be worth it. It was for him the last straw– “Ophelia drowned for love——sad, but true. Would Ophelia drown for physics? No, boo,” he says, and drops out of high school.
This was a pivotal moment. “Congregation, if I didn’t make a move my life would be over soon. I grabbed on to the only lifeline i knew, Shakespeare. Acting is the only profession that doesn’t require good grades.”
He moved to New York at 17 and auditioned for (an unnamed) acting school. He got in. A white teacher was racist. He dropped out. (A fact-check: He actually trained at several, and has an MFA.)
If the way Shakespeare saved Jacob Ming-Trent’s life seems mostly by giving him a livelihood, and perhaps more amorphously an identity and a purpose, there is at least one tangible life lesson that he attributes to the Bard. It’s what at the end softens the harsh portraits and grim stories in the play: “Shakespeare usually ends his comedies with an act of forgiveness, and my life has been a comedy of errors. I’ve been walking around thinking nobody’s ever been hurt like me.” His ability to understand that others have hurt too – to believe in sweet mercy as nobility’s true badge that is reason (along with Basquiat, james Baldwin, and Biggie Small, and the teacher that made him read Henry the Fifth) that “I’m able to stand in front of you today to tell this story.”
How Shakespeare Saved My Life
Red Bull at Public Theater through October 25
Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $84
Written and Performed by Jacob Ming-Trent
Directed by Tony Taccone
Scenic design by Takeshi Taka, costume design by Danielle Preston, lighting design by Alan C. Edwards, original music and sound design by Jake Rodriguez, projection design by Alexander V. Nichols
Photos by Hanjie Chow
