How Shakespeare Saved My Life is not the white-savior play I was expecting. Instead, it is a play about the mutual transformation that can occur when cultures are allowed to breathe the same air authentically.
The play begins with this direct address to the audience:
“Welcome to my ancestors and spiritual protectors.
No matter where you come from, what you do or don’t do. Whom you love or don’t love, I love you because you’ve chosen to congregate here this evening.
“Thank you for coming, Congregation.”
In the Church of God in Christ one expects to hear calls-and-responses of “amen.” In The Folger Shakespeare Library under the Jacob Ming-Trent’s ministry the congregation is exhorted to respond with: “Play on.”
Ming-Trent is a heftily built Stella Adler-trained actor who performs with the joyful passion of someone whose faith has been tried, tested and found true.
But be forewarned. Call-and-response format thrives in both sacred and secular contexts. And there is a lot of your meat-and-potatoes profanity in How Shakespeare Saved My Life.
That may be a spoiler and I’m sorry if it is. But it’s worth knowing before you go that the Shakespeare that playwright and actor Jacob Ming-Trent introduces us to is not your museum-quality Shakespeare. This is not the pristine Shakespeare that is weaponized to preserve the culture of Whiteness by protecting white audiences from having to experience and acknowledge Black people as human and, therefore, universal (As Ming-Trent notes, later in the show, anyone not all White in this culture is all black).
One-person autobiographical plays are always about the same thing which is, as another Black gospel song puts it: “How I Got Over.” (Or How I survived and thrived.) As Ming-Trent tells us:
“I walked into the wrong classroom and the teacher wouldn’t let me leave until I read a Shakespeare speech. When I woke up that morning, I was a super predator but by that afternoon I was a Shakespearean prodigy.”
The way Ming-Trent got over was to shift and shape Shakespeare as much as Shakespeare shifted and shaped him. (Think of how John Coltrane inhabited “My Favorite Things” or how Joe Zawinul brought forth “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” during his Cannonball Adderley years.)
As Ming-Trent puts it: “I’m going roll Shakespeare in some flour and some Black seasonings Imma shake him, fry him up, put him on a waffle and hot sauce him up. Then I’m gonna f-ckin’ feed him back to you.”
Ming-Trent’s personal stories are dire and the essence of tragedy. Our “Shakespearean prodigy” shows us how the tragedies in Jacob Ming-Trent’s life and the Tragedies of Shakespeare are birthed from the same matrix and are in conversation with one another. The words from one tragedy bleed into the other. His homelessness as a teenager after being abandoned by his mother exists in the same space as Lear’s homelessness after being abandoned by his daughters. His days being drenched in the rain under a bridge become Lear’s time on the heath. The transformation of words and articulation of the suffering does not go one way.
Starting out with an archetypal park bench flanked by nondescript sliver-gray panels director Tony Taccone made aggressive use of the technical talent at his disposal in supporting and shaping Ming-Trent’s narrative.
In an interview on The Shakespeare Unlimited Podcast, Ming-Trent overtly articulated something that was suggested onstage:
“Shakespeare saved my life but my dad’s spirit saved my life and my grandmother and some teachers along the way. Shakespeare did but a lot of other people did…All of those lifelines are available to us.”
Gregory Ford is the Anacostia Coordinating Council Arts & Culture Critic. He is also an actor and singer. He is a member of Verbal Gymnastics Playback Theater troupe. He has written for dctheatrescene.com and continues to write for dctheaterarts.org, focusing on College and University Theater Productions. He is a clinical practitioner of psychodrama. Mr. Ford lives in Northeast Boundary in Ward 7.
