Jacob Ming-Trent is a journeyman actor who’s made a memorable impression over the years in a wide range of roles, from classics like Merry Wives and Twelfth Night to contemporary standouts like Hands on a Hardbody and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Father Comes Home From the War. He’s a natural Falstaff — a role he’s played more than once — with his prominent belly, ebullient nature, and mellifluous voice that can seem either elevated or down-home as needed.
He’s also a man whose remarkable backstory suggests an indomitable will to overcome personal challenges, beginning with his hardscrabble upbringing in lower-middle-class Pittsburgh in the 1980s and ’90s. In How Shakespeare Saved My Life, Ming-Trent credits an unlikely inspiration and life coach who helped lift him from a difficult family life into a thriving career as an artist. Yes, the Bard. Ming-Trent was an indifferent student who curiously found the rhymes of William Shakespeare every bit as compelling as those of Tupac, Biggie Smalls, and other master hip-hop wordsmiths plying their craft on the radio of his youth. He borrows from Two Gentlemen of Verona to woo a girl to whom he loses his virginity (“What light is light, if Sylvia be not seen?”), and invokes the Bard’s comic timing while playing the dozens with three buddies from his neighborhood gang.
Ming-Trent’s talent shines through as he portrays a wide range of characters from a life marked by harrowing trauma: from the stern mother who kicked him out of the house at age 16 to the absentee dad whose similar artistic ambitions were undone by drug addiction to the local preacher who offers a sympathetic ear at a critical moment. Through periods of homelessness, stints in jail, and hospitalization for smoking weed laced with PCP, Ming-Trent endured a world of hurt while seeking recognition as an artist and a tribe that would accept him unconditionally.
It’s an inspiring and sometimes exhausting tale — one that is amplified by Alexander V. Nichols’s projections on Takeshi Kata’s simple but effective set of sliding panels. Under Tony Taccone’s direction and Tiffany Rachelle Stewart’s movement direction, Ming-Trent moves nimbly about the stage with feline stealth, engaging the audience repeatedly in call-and-response moments that help soften the blow of the trauma that’s just been exposed. “Play on?” he asks, and we’re invited to shout back, “Play on.”
Toward the end of his monologue, Ming-Trent goes a little woo-woo, invoking the ghost of his late father and a succession of ancestors who help guide him through episodes of severe depression. It’s a curious choice since the performer seems reluctant to acknowledge the actual tribe where he seems to have found support and validation: the theater. For much of the evening, we see young Jacob describe himself as a Shakespearean actor in training and testing casting directors on whether to perform in a put-on Ian McKellen voice or bring his own authentic line readings to the Bard’s text. But we never see him actually land a role, or fully make it his own, or succeeding in his boyhood ambitions.
It’s a strange omission for a work that is so fully absorbed in the process of finding oneself in the artistic world, of surviving the vagaries of life to achieve one’s dreams, and of forging a creative life while maintaining a sense of authenticity. After hearing all that Ming-Trent had to overcome to earn his moment in the spotlight, he never allows himself the time to actually bask in it. That’s a shame. How Shakespeare Saved My Life details an absorbing, often haunting journey through the darkness — but offers only fleeting glimpses of the light on the other side. ★★★☆☆
HOW SHAKESPEARE SAVED MY LIFE
Public Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through October 25 for $84