How Shakespeare Saved My Life
Jacob Ming-Trent
Berkeley Repertory Theatre (in co-production with Folger Theatre and Red Bull Theater
In her introductory remarks to the opening night’s packed audience in Berkeley Rep’s Peet’s Theatre, Artistic Director Johanna Pfaelzer told us that given all the horrific things occurring currently in our country and world, being together in this space was like being in a sanctuary where we can “I dare say, worship together” and “where lives can change.” In the next ninety-five minutes, we in fact became a spellbound and enraptured congregation that acclaimed actor, poet, and playwright, Jacob Ming-Trent, frequently called upon to participate with him as he recounted in a tour de force, singular performance How Shakespeare Saved My Life.
Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s world premiere production of his written and performed, autobiographical unfolding of how his relationship with the Bard helped rescue him from the “slings and arrows” of his past. The result is an incredible mixture of gripping intensity, laugh-out-loud fun, and exciting engagement. Jacob Ming-Trent’s How Shakespeare Saved My Life is nothing short of a must-see in which his words, demeanor, and final invitation for our action in fact might be life-changing for someone in the audience that in the evening’s end, gives him a well-deserved standing ovation.
Jacob Ming-Trent first encounters Shakespeare in an eighth-grade English class taught by the school’s football coach where class begins with, “Let’s kick some Shakespeare butt.” After the young boy reads with some hesitation a passage out-loud as required in class, the coach/teacher demands he try again, barking, “This time put your balls in it. “ The young Jacob grabs his courage and delivers King Henry V’s “Band of Brothers” passage with full voice and total body gusto. So taken is he by the experience, an angel appears and tells him “You will be a great classical actor.” Even though he admits to us that the heavenly host’s appearance never really happened, he tells us that by the end of the class, “I was reborn;” and by the next year, “Me and Shakespeare became partners.”
In fact, by the time sixteen-year-old Jacob drops out of school soon after finding himself homeless because his mother kicked him out of the house, when asked thereafter what did he do, Jacob’s response is always, “I am a Shakespearean actor.”
Leaving his hometown of Pittsburgh and landing via a Greyhound Bus in New York’s Time Square, Jacob signs up for classical acting class, telling his skeptical acting teacher, “I’m using the Bard like Popeye uses spinach.” With a background beat as his pace-setter and rap as his guide to recitation, Jacob tells us — his oft-declared “Congregation” — that at that moment, “To be or not to be … I chose to be.”
But as we soon hear, “being” was not at all easy for this aspiring actor. Finding shelter and a bite to eat becomes a daily challenge for the now seventeen-year-old whose mother still rejected him and whose father was shooting up on drugs. He is even told by a minister that a church’s empty pew could not provide a safe haven for even one night (claiming “liability insurance” issues).
We soon realize that what has been marketed as a solo performance is actually a stage full of many persona ranging the whole gamut of age, gender, race, nationality, profession, sexual orientation, and even the state of being alive or dead. Through impressive transformations of voice, accent, facial expressions, body stance, and an incredible variety of suddenly acquired, nuanced traits, Jacob Ming-Trent alternates between his own progression of maturity and all the people he encounters along the way — both real and in his imagination.
Through him, we meet the likes of Popeye, Toilet, and Backwash, rappers all who initiate him into their street crew as “Black Shakespeare,” where they hang out nightly amidst the alley-lined, graffitied walls of Neo-expressionist Basquiat. They also introduce him to the beats and words of gansta rappers like Tupac and B.I.G. — artists who become lifelong inspirations for this young poet who is finding that along with four-hundred-year-old verses, the emerging music of the ’80s is also shaping more and more his own artistic and personal development.
While the boy who dropped out of school tells us, “Acting is the only profession that doesn’t requite good grades,” we witness how even as he struggles to survive on a day-to-day basis, Jacob is always learning life’s important and sometimes tough lessons from the vast array of characters he meets. A proudly swishing, limp-wristed guy who introduces himself as a “ho, but a well-read ho,” posits a jarring but important question to a young man who has spent his growing-up seeking refuge: “It is better to be safe or to be free?” A doctor asks, “Do you know your Baldwin?” while an old lady hanging feebly onto her walker implores him to love everyone he meets while forgiving them as well as himself. Each of these and so many more come to full life in front of us as Jacob Ming-Trent leads us through his incredibly difficult but amazingly resilient journey of growing up and eventually landing where he is today as a star of stage, film, and television.
In creating this world premiere for Berkeley Rep as well as for the co-producing companies of Folger Theatre and Red Bull Theater, Jacob Ming-Trent has partnered with the former Artistic Director of the Rep, Tony Taccone, the director of How Shakespeare Saved My Life. The flow of the many scenes and characters of Jacob’s life occurs seamlessly and is peppered by frequent solicitations of the audience to become part of the show in a variety of ways — most often like a church congregation repeating together a planned response to a solicitation from the stage.
Movement of his own body as well as what appears often like a spontaneous set of dance steps across the wide and open Peet’s Theatre stage become more ways that Jacob Ming-Trent exposes the ah-ha’s, the vulnerabilities, the joys, and the set-backs of his life’s progression. As choreographer, Tiffany Rachelle Stewart deserves major kudos.
The creative elements of the evening very much play their own important, starring roles in shaping and relaying this coming-of-age accounting. A massive back-wall’s many doors and panels slide, open, and re-size to help switch scenes, moods, and realities — all part of the effective and inviting scenic design by Takeshi Kata. Onto those same walls, pallets of colors and designs, scenes of inner city neighborhoods and busy streets, caricatures from video games and TV cartoons, portraits of the famous, and so much more are projected as sensationally designed by Alexander V. Nichols. The lighting of Alan C. Edwards is often a show unto itself as lit spots and squares suddenly define confined spaces trapping our narrator; as shadows explode to gigantic dimensions to match a current, portrayed character’s message; or as a storm’s fury cuts through the night with lightning strikes that cause one to jerk quickly to the side as if to avoid being struck.
Those storms are made all the more real by powerful claps of thunder — just one small part of Jake Rodriguez’s total design of sound whose effects along with his original music together become a soundtrack extraordinaire that enhance immensely the emotions, the inner thoughts, and the deluge of challenges and accomplishments that Jacob Ming-Trent is so amazingly conveying.
And while it clearly has taken a theatrical village’s collaboration to launch a world premiere of How Shakespeare Saved My Life that should have long legs beyond Berkeley Rep in terms of future performances on many other stages, it is the huge smiles, sparkling eyes, and big gestures that often feel like virtual hugs of Jacob Ming-Trent whose story of salvation has captivated our rapt attention, drawn us in as full participants, and left us inspired and maybe even ready to be a bit more forgiving in a ‘us vs. them’ world that exists outside the theater’s sanctuary of togetherness.
Rating: 5 E, MUST-SEE
A Theatre Eddys Best Bet Production
How Shakespeare Saved My Life continues through March 1. 2026, in a ninety-five minute (no intermission) world premiere by Berkeley Repertory Theatre (in co-production with Folger Theatre and Red Bull Theater) in Peet’s Theatre, 2025 Addison Street, Berkeley, California. Tickets are available online at https://www.berkeleyrep.org/ or by calling the Box Office Tuesday – Sunday, noon – 7 p.m. at 510-647-2949.
Photo Credits: Kevin Berne
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