How Shakespeare Saved My Life

As of October 2026, Jacob Ming-Trent is the only performer in How Shakespeare Saved My Life, a solo play he also wrote. He plays himself, billed as Jacob, and steps into the shoes of everyone else in his story too. The piece is an autobiographical evening that blends hip-hop, poetry and storytelling, and its author calls it an epic poem.

This is a Red Bull Theater production presented at The Public Theater, in the Shiva Theater, and it is the New York premiere of a limited Off-Broadway engagement. Red Bull Theater, founded in 2003 by artistic director Jesse Berger, focuses on lesser-staged plays from Shakespeare's era and on new writing in dialogue with the classics.

The evening is framed as a testimony, the kind a preacher might give. The big book on stage holds Shakespeare instead of scripture, and the audience is addressed as the congregation.

The tale starts in childhood, when his father goes to jail. At 12, the morning after his father leaves the family, he walks into the wrong classroom. The teacher has him read a speech from Henry V to the class. The moment gives him a sense of power and purpose and points him toward classical acting.

As a teenager he is thrown out of the family home and is homeless twice before he turns 16. He falls in with a street gang, and a rap-battling friend called Toilet is one of the people he plays. He later drops out of high school. An acting teacher tells him that Shakespeare should sound white, which sets up a scene where he delivers Hamlet two ways.

Eventually he moves to New York to become a Shakespearean actor. He struggles to earn a living, to find a community and to avoid his father's self-destructive habits. His stage career itself gets little time; the focus stays on the upbringing.

The text is built as verse. At a 2024 reading it was billed as an epic poem told in verse, rhyme and song. It combines original rhyming verse, rap, beatboxing and spoken word with speeches from many Shakespeare plays and at least one sonnet. The Shakespeare monologues are often delivered in the manner of slam poetry, and the beatboxing and spoken-word passages set the story to a beat.

The central idea is that Shakespeare was an urban poet who reported what he saw, much as the hip-hop artists the author grew up with did. The script ties him to Biggie Smalls, Tupac Shakur, Basquiat and James Baldwin. Its themes include forgiveness, especially toward his mother. It also takes on generational trauma, racism and typecasting of actors of color, sizeism in the theater industry, homelessness and the plight of war veterans.

The author says at the start that the show is not strictly an autobiography, and some episodes are heightened with poetic license. In an interview with Folger Theatre he said about 95 percent of the events happened.

Projection carries much of the staging. Nichols's images run continuously, using colorful typefaces, graphics and illustrations to establish each scene, with only a few simple set pieces on stage. The projections also use footage of Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Biggie and Tupac, and mix in comic-book effects and one video-game sequence.

Expect to be part of it. The audience repeats a short cue taken from Twelfth Night throughout the evening. The performer chats with people in the house, asks a few for their names and courts one with lines of Shakespeare. A volunteer may be asked to stand in for his high-school crush, Sylvia, and in one episode the whole house becomes a crowd chanting that he should play Othello.

The piece grew out of personal anecdotes, strung together first and shaped into a script later. Suzan-Lori Parks read some of his early writing in 2014, while Father Comes Home from the Wars was being staged, and told him to keep going. He started drafting the stories at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, where he had been hired to write a cabaret, and finished the script backstage during his year in Gypsy. He sent about 16 pages to Red Bull Theater, which commissioned the piece, and Folger Theatre then co-commissioned it.

Red Bull held a reading on April 15, 2024, at the Sheen Center's Shiner Theatre, 18 Bleecker Street, as part of its month-long 20th anniversary festival that spring. Karen Ann Daniels directed, with music by the author and Ray Leslee and a three-piece band.

The full production began at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where it had its world premiere in Berkeley, California, starting January 23, 2026, and ran through March 1, 2026. Folger Theatre in Washington, DC, staged it next, from June 9 to July 5, 2026, with opening night on June 14, and billed that run as the world premiere. Red Bull describes the project as a rolling world premiere, co-produced with Berkeley Rep and Folger.

The New York engagement at the Public had its first preview on September 15, 2026, and opened on September 27, 2026.