KPFA Theatre Critic Richard Wolinsky reviews “How Shakespeare Changed My Life” at Berkeley Rep Peets Theatre through March 1, 2026.
TEXT OF REVIEW
You’re just a kid. You’re Black .Your teachers think you’re stupid, a hopeless fat boy. At home, your mom tossed out your junkie dad. Mom herself is ice cold, and when you’re sixteen, Mom throws you out on the street. You’re homeless, destitute, and you love Shakespeare.
That’s the start of the world premiere one person play, How Shakespeare Saved My Life, written and performed by Jacob Ming-Trent, now at Berkeley Rep’s Peets Theatre through March 1st.
The play is billed as semi-autobiographical, and it’s unclear what the relationship is between Jacob the character and Jacob the playwright performer. The real Jacob, for example, was already on stage at age eleven, and was admitted to acting school in New York at the age of seventeen, before developing a career in Hollywood. It shouldn’t matter, but in retrospect, it does.
The story, at least, feels real, and Jacob Ming-Trent has the acting chops to make it so, to grab an audience and to keep them.
When the play works, it works wonders. The basic idea is that Shakespeare himself was an urban artist, in his own lifetime no different than Tupac or Biggie or the Wu-Tang Clan. Famous lines from the plays are easily incorporated into the dialogue, and each takes on new meaning and resonance. The Elizabethan poet meets the street.
Jacob Ming-Trent has an innate ability to create empathy, an empathy that expands via the brilliant immersive staging of director Tony Taccone. When the lights, the sound, the acting and the script all work in tandem, the result can be stunning, as witness the character Jacob’s discovery of James Baldwin, or his scenes with his dad. The theater shakes, the images flashed behind the actor never stop.
But not everything does work. Phone dialogues with God through an old fashioned telephone fall flat, as does a sequence in a jail cell with an individual of uncertain gender. Some Shakespearean monologues go on too long, and the play itself does not stick the landing, leaving the audience wondering how the play’s Jacob became the stage’s Jacob. Audience participation, so successful earlier, now dissipates in a final, unearned test.
But as a world premiere, some of these issues can be corrected going forward and there is enough here, and Jacob Ming-Trent is talented enough, to find solutions to these and other problematic elements. How Shakespeare Saved My Life is a work in progress, but even so, it’s a diamond in the rough.
How Shakespeare Saved My Life plays at Berkeley Rep’s Peets Theatre through March 1st. For more information you can go to berkeleyrep.org. I’m Richard Wolinsky on Bay Area Theatre for KPFA.