Theatre in Review: How Shakespeare Saved My Life (Red Bull Theater/Public Theater)Regarding the above title, Jacob Ming-Trent isn't trafficking in metaphors. With a resume that includes Twelfth Night, The Tempest, Cymbeline, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Merry Wives, Jocelyn Bioh's remix of The Merry Wives of Windsor, you might think Old Will primarily provided the actor with some crucial career boosts. But this new solo show covers Ming-Trent's adolescence and early adulthood, which, as presented here, was a long dark night of the soul, with the Bard pointing the way to daylight. In its early passages, How Shakespeare Saved My Life amuses as a comic bildungsroman about Ming-Trent's literary education. There's the irate teacher who snaps, "How dare you read Shakespeare in my English class? We are reading Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" -- a text that Ming-Trent neatly fillets, extracting its most racist aspects. Then there's the instructor who commands Ming-Trent to read the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V, unwittingly launching a lifetime love affair. A little bit from The Two Gentlemen of Verona lands the young man with his first romantic success. But darkness soon prevails. A soul-deflating encounter with a pretentious acting teacher, who says his handling of Shakespearean speech is "too Black," sends him running home to Pittsburgh, where his mother dramatically washes her hands of him. (Skeptical of his theatrical dreams, she notes that the post office is hiring.) His father, ejected from the house several years earlier, is too strung out to offer anything but generalized wisdom. Soon, Ming-Trent is living on the streets, falling in with a gang of drug dealers. His downward spiral includes jail time, suicidal ideation, and a stay in a mental hospital. It's a busy, bustling, often brutal ninety minutes, and Ming-Trent cleverly works in more Bardian poetry than you'll find anywhere south of the Delacorte Theatre. Aside from the above examples, his mother's plan to remarry triggers a bit of the closet scene from Hamlet ("O shame, where is thy blush?"); his facility with the "To be or not to be" soliloquy earns him cred with his street friends; and his cellmate, a trans prostitute, eloquently quotes from Measure for Measure. At a rock-bottom moment, his father's unquiet spirit appears, ready to recreate the late King Hamlet's ghostly appearance on the parapet at Elsinore. Ming-Trent is a ball of fire, pacing the stage and working the room with brio, for example, getting us to chant "Play on!" by way of egging him on at each narrative turning point. He impersonates a vivid gallery of oddballs, criminals, and the walking wounded. (My personal favorite: the physics teacher who, on the first day of the course, cheerily tells students, "In my class, you'll feel as if you've been abandoned in the middle of the ocean, and you are about to DIE a horrible drowning death!" (So much for STEM recruitment.) The actor is an uncommonly vivid writer, especially in the scorching face-offs with his unloving mother. (She's not as bad as Medea, but only just.) Then again, this crowded hour-and-a-half moves so quickly from crisis to crisis that it all becomes hard to absorb. At times, Ming-Trent seems like a docent, hustling us through the exhibits in his own personal museum of trauma. It doesn't help that some sections have clearly been fictionalized, leaving one to wonder what is true and what is fanciful. (That story about being chased down the street by an angry white mob, demanding he play Othello? Hmmm.) Curiously, his moment of salvation comes not from Shakespeare but from embracing James Baldwin's famous words: "It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here." Arguably, Tony Taccone's productions could do with fewer bells and whistles. Early on, Ming-Trent gets a laugh when complaining, "I don't want to be up here all alone. But the American theatre doesn't got no money, so I've got to play all the roles." Maybe, but no expense appears to have been spared in Alexander V. Nichols' video design, Alan C. Edwards' lighting, and Jake Rodriguez's original music and sound. One such audio-visual bit features Ming-Trent lost inside a video game; having seen this production, I know how that feels. All these design contributions are exceptionally well done, but Taccone could boost the piece's effectiveness by dialing them down a bit. (Takeshi Kata's set and Danielle Preston's costumes avoid overkill.) Ming-Trent is always a pleasure to see. (He was a riot in Merry Wives and Red Bull's The Alchemist and has distinguished himself in numerous other productions.) And the script is packed with powerful moments, most of them arguing persuasively for the shaping effect Shakespeare had on the actor's rise to maturity. But even the most gripping episodes here want more reflection, more breathing room, and the staging feels oddly overhyped. By the time we see Ming-Trent getting beat up, a sequence punctuated by "Pow!" and "Wham!" projections, I felt a little pummeled myself. The actor has an important story to tell, but, in the words of that noted dramaturg, Gertrude, Queen of Elsinore, "More matter with less art." --David Barbour 
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