When he was 12, in 1992, Jacob Ming-Trent walked into the wrong room at school and ended up in a Shakespeare class rather than the math one he was supposed to attend. That’s where he first encountered “the word wizard, the Stratford scribe, the royal rhymer himself.”
That’s how the adult Ming-Trent puts it in his new solo show “How Shakespeare Saved My Life,” recalling how the writer would become a lifelong guide and companion. His mother had just thrown out the boy’s troubled father from their home in Pittsburgh and warned her child that the outside world held no mercy for him. So, you can forgive a young Ming-Trent for being discombobulated when he got to school, and also understand why he might have been more open to new experiences than otherwise had been.
Finding a spiritual kinship with Shakespeare helped the young Jacob deal with hardship, including losing his physical home at 16 when his mother kicked him out as well. As New York theater lovers know, Ming-Trent has become a respected actor with quite a few Shakespeare credits to his name, including Falstaff in “Merry Wives,” Jocelyn Bioh’s 2021 adaptation of “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” at the Delacorte Theater. The New York Times praised his performance for incorporating “into one bigger-than-life portrait your drunk uncle, a horndog Redd Foxx and some would-be Barry White.”
Other actors have also explored their relationships with Shakespeare: There have been investigations of his most dastardly characters from Steven Berkoff (“Shakespeare’s Villains”) and Patrick Page (“All the Devils Are Here”); while Tina Packer surveyed the female ones (“Women of Will”). “How Shakespeare Saved My Life” is closer to Stephan Wolfert’s “Cry Havoc!” and Madeline Sayet’s “Where We Belong,” which explored how one’s life can connect with the playwright’s worlds and words.
Ming-Trent has said that 95 percent of his play is based on his life experiences, though a subtitle in the script suggests some liberties were taken: “A theatrical retelling based on my true stories.” He recounts interactions with his drug-addicted father and his mercilessly standoffish mother, as well as his own Lear-like descent into turmoil and bouts of homelessness. At 17, he moves to New York and befriends a crew of misfits who share a house and hang out in a park; after he wins a rap battle, they deliver an initiation beating. “The world hates us,” they tell him, “So we gotta make sure you tough.”
These experiences might have led to a realistic docudrama approach, but Ming-Trent takes another tack, delivering a picaresque coming-of-age-like fable à la Voltaire’s “Candide,” as told by a combination of rapper and preacher. This might explain, to put it generously, why some of the supporting characters Ming-Trent impersonates feel like broad lampoons.
Guiding us through his eventful upbringing and his discovery of acting, Ming-Trent underlines the giddy connections between Shakespeare and childhood heroes like Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, and adopts a church service’s exuberant call-and-response with the audience, which he calls his “congregation.” (Projections by Alexander V. Nichols enliven Tony Taccone’s production for Red Bull Theater at the Public Theater.) This does not leave much time to slow down and ponder the poetry that supposedly inspires him.
Working his way through Shakespeare, the young Jacob realizes he must always dig deeper and deeper. The problem is that many around him are not inclined to give him the opportunity to do so. In acting school, a teacher witheringly deems Jacob unsuitable for any of Shakespeare’s roles. “Frankly, my dear boy, you sound … Black,” he says. “But your more egregious sin is, you sound … fat.”
Ming-Trent is not deterred. He offers a casting agent a terrific imitation of Ian McKellen doing Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, then does the same lines again but by pouring his own “dark matter” into them.
Toward the end of the show, Ming-Trent tantalizes us. “Congregation, I could tell you what happened next,” he says. “But it doesn’t matter what happened next.”
It does, though.
He alludes to forgiving the mother he once called his personal Iago, and obviously he is doing well enough to have a show at the Public. But it’s hard not to wonder about his first professional steps as an actor and how they changed, or not, his relationship with Shakespeare. A life saved must be lived, after all.
How Shakespeare Saved My Life Through Oct. 25 at Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
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