How Shakespeare Saved My Life review: Jacob Ming-Trent’s one-man mix of memoir, tall tale, and verse

# What the show is Jacob Ming-Trent presents a one-man show that he calls "testimony." He tells the audience up front that the piece is not strictly autobiographical. The performance recounts how a Black, overweight, homeless high school dropout found Shakespeare and decided to pursue acting. Ming-Trent layers Shakespearean verse, original rap, and anecdote, often moving between tall tale and personal memory so the line between fact and performance blurs.

# How it's staged The set is minimal: a single church pew anchors the stage. Despite limited physical props, the production uses projection design, original music, and intense lighting to create bigger scenes—street chases, police arrest, a jail cell—so the audience sees more than the spare furniture suggests. The show runs 90 minutes without intermission.

# The performance style Ming-Trent's energy and humor drive the piece. He slips between straight storytelling and fully staged theatrical moments. He enlists volunteers for short scenes, performs Shakespearean monologues without announcing their sources, and mixes in rap to move the narrative forward. The result is an often exuberant performance that leans into whimsy and surreal touches as much as it does to memoir.

# Key episodes and motifs

• A wrong classroom becomes the moment of conversion: at 16 he hears a Coriolanus speech and describes it as a revelation that there is "a world elsewhere."
• Shakespeare's lines serve practical and comic purposes: Ming-Trent uses passages to charm, to argue with teachers, and to escape trouble.
• A staged arrest and jail sequence introduces a cellmate who recites Shakespeare flawlessly and describes reading canonical texts as both oppression and survival.
• A softer throughline emerges late: Ming-Trent points to comedy's Shakespearean habit of ending with forgiveness, and credits that idea—mercy and shared hurt—with helping him tell his story publicly.

# Tone and truth

# Final impression The piece showcases Ming-Trent's comic timing and theatrical gifts, using Shakespeare as both material and metaphor. It trades precise factual reporting for theatrical effect, inviting the audience to inhabit a life story told in performance rather than in documentary detail. The show runs through October 25 at the Public Theater.