Review: Jacob Ming-Trent Shares His Life and Love of Shakespeare in New Solo Show

Those who saw the filmed version of the Public Theater’s 2022 Shakespeare in the Park production of Merry Wives on PBS will surely remember Jacob Ming-Trent, the highlight of that production as Falstaff. But Ming-Trent has been a reliable Broadway and off-Broadway stalwart for a while, the kind of scene-stealing performer one always looks forward to seeing in a show no matter how small his role. So the opportunity to see him command the stage all by himself, as he does in his solo show, Red Bull Theater’s How Shakespeare Saved My Life at the Public Theater, already holds immense promise going in. Not only does he fully live up to that promise, but it turns out he’s a solid playwright as well.

Born to a drug-addicted father and an indifferent mother, Ming-Trent was thrown out of his family home as a teenager and eventually became a high-school dropout. Before he left school, though, he took a Shakespeare class that so blew him away he immediately developed an aspiration to become a great Shakespearean actor. He moves to New York City to try to realize his dream, but beyond inevitable professional challenges, he runs up against more practical ones: making a living, finding a welcoming community, and keeping the threat of picking up his father’s self-destructive habits at bay. Various circumstances lead him to the edge of suicide.

Despite the implication of the show’s title, “this is not an autobiographical tale,” Ming-Trent declares up front. True to that surprising claim, some of the anecdotes he recounts do carry more than a whiff of poetic license. Most memorable in that regard is an episode in which he sees a performance of Othello, then afterwards finds himself chased by a crowd chanting “You should play Othello” (Ming-Trent, in one of a handful bits of audience participation, invites us to play the crowd) before cops arrest him for disturbing the peace. It’s difficult to imagine such an incident happening exactly the way Ming-Trent describes it. And yet, questions about veracity hardly matter in context, not only because of Ming-Trent’s delivery, but because the episode speaks to deeper truths about the theater industry’s tendency of typecasting performers, especially those of color. (As he professes in the lead-up to this scene, he was more interested in playing Hamlet.)

How Shakespeare Saved My Life is filled with such moments of what filmmaker Werner Herzog famously termed “ecstatic truth.” In fact, Ming-Trent tips his hand to this aspect of his approach as well in the show’s opening moments. “This show is testimony,” he says. “I’m using my stories to shine a light on bigger things.” Such bigger things include racism not only in the theater world but in America at large; homelessness; and even the plight of war veterans (only after his death, according to the show, does Ming-Trent discover his father was a soldier). Even at its most social-justice-oriented, though, Shakespeare looms large. Though Ming-Trent also grew up with influences like Jean-Michel Basquiat and hip-hop legends like Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, he always comes back to the Bard, making the argument that, like those Black artists, he was “an urban poet reporting what he saw.”

Ming-Trent fully embodies the spirit of a Shakespeare-loving urban poet in his writing and performance. Quotes from myriad Shakespeare plays pepper his prose, with many of those monologues delivered in the style of slam poetry. But this is more than just him showing off his Shakespearean cred. In the ways he connects some of those Shakespeare quotes to moments in his own life, Ming-Trent makes a better case than any academic could as to how Shakespeare speaks to shared humanity and why his plays still deserve to be performed today. And even though he adopts the persona of a preacher onstage—including addressing the audience as “congregation”—because of the ways he grounds the show’s larger themes in his own personal experience, the show never comes off as pushy or didactic.

Director Tony Taccone offers a sturdy platform on which Ming-Trent can strut his stuff, with Alexander V. Nichols’s projection design playing an especially important role in bringing Ming-Trent’s deeply personal sermon to life. Above all, though, How Shakespeare Saved My Life offers not only a confirmation of Ming-Trent’s seemingly boundless energy and charisma, but also a brilliant showcase of his dramatic range. As hilarious and playful as he can be, he also displays a tragic and vulnerable side that he’s fully willing to face head-on. Based on this performance, give him his Hamlet already!