If I were still a pastor serving a local church, I would want my congregation to know how to connect what I share with them to their own lives and experience. It would not be enough for me to tell them how a particular text or life experience benefited me alone. In “How Shakespeare Saved My Life,” currently running at the Public’s Shiva Theater, playwright and performer Jacob Ming-Trent asks the audience to be his congregation. He invites participation (“Play on”) and asks the audience direct questions, “Does anyone feel their presence is attacking the power structure of the entire western world? Raise your hand” (at the performance I attended, only a few raised their hands). Unfortunately, there is no reciprocal witnessing. Ming-Trent takes nothing from those responses. He tells his congregation the story of his salvation but does not succeed in helping his members locate themselves in that story or how it relates them to each other and the world.

Jacob does tell his personal salvation story effectively. At a young age his father introduced him to the importance of words: “Learn to use ya words, a word can save ya life.” But Jacob is introduced to Shakespeare when he “walks into the wrong classroom” and meets Shakespeare through his school’s Shakespeare teacher, who is also the football coach. The teacher makes Jacob recite “Henry V’s” St. Crispin’s Day speech and explains to him that a person can be “reborn” through struggle. Jacob then says, “When I woke up that morning, I was a super-predator. After that class, I was a Shakespeare prodigy! This is Jacob’s rebirth. From that point on, his knowledge of Shakespeare gives him language, offers him imaginative possibility, and an identity and capital beyond the social labels imposed on him “by the West.”

As he moves through his life, Jacob uses his command of the Bard to achieve power, his keen sense of humor, and a pathway to social access. He uses Portia’s speech about mercy from “The Merchant of Venice” to get out of detention. He uses a speech about Sylvia to flirt successfully at a party, humorously claiming that Shakespeare helped him lose his virginity. And he uses Sylvia’s speech from “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” where she is a central female character and the object of affection for both Valentine and Proteus, to impress a girl at a party. However, there are times when Shakespeare does not serve Jacob well.

Shakespeare serves Jacob poorly when quoting the Bard becomes a means of seeking safety through white approval rather than expressing his own identity as occurs when Jacob goes for an audition and to impress the white “casting Lady” considers suppressing his own voice and performing Hamlet like Ian McKellen or Laurence Olivier. Here Shakespeare becomes tied to survival through assimilation, leaving Jacob to question whether gaining access to the theatrical world costs him his soul and his identity. The play’s title’s promise of “salvation through Shakespeare also fractures when Jacob is in prison and understands that Shakespeare has become a “gilded cage.” He feels that the whiter and more prestigious Shakespeare seems, the more valuable he feels when speaking the words. Instead of freeing Jacob, this attachment to the Bard makes him feel safer when he conforms to Western standards rather than being fully himself. So, if it is not Shakespeare that always saves Jacob, what or who does?

Jacob’s real salvation comes with a spiritual encounter with James Baldwin. After being hospitalized following contemplating suicide, he tells his doctor, “I’m ready to die.” Quoting Shakespeare, Jacob professes, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing.” This prompts his doctor to make an important diagnosis: “Mr….Jacob, i have your diagnosis, You know your Shakespeare, but do you know your Baldwin?” The doctor realizes that Jacob needs to connect to his community, not just the Western community. This “diagnosis” is the play’s critical point. Jacob “sees” an image of Baldwin who tells Jacob:

“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.” You have a right to be here Mr. Jacob. But know this, your mere presence, your mere presence, is attacking the entire power structure of the western world. your spirit is crumbling under the weight of that oppression. That is why you’re considering suicide.”

This revelation stirs up the need to seek revenge for what the structure of the western world has done to him. Instead, he revisits the church and “phones” God:

“God this is Jacob. im not praying to you. This is a negotiation. God you owe me. You sent me into the world fat black and ugly. you gave me parents, one an addict the other a broken heart. This skin you gave me makes me an enemy of western world. The blackhole my father willed to me is killing me. God you owe me.” Jacob expects God to answer; however, he receives a message that connects him to his salvation.

Jacob’s Dad’s voice answers and “his spirit dad spirit brought me to the edge of a sea. My grandmother was standing on the water summoning me.” Jacob not only sees his grandmother but also thousands of Ancestors dancing on the waters with him. And that’s when [Jacob] found unconditional love.

The climactic ancestral vision confirms Baldwin’s role. Jacob sees “thousands of Ancestors, my tribe,” including “Basquiat Baldwin biggie and one white dude, William Shakespeare.” The ordering is meaningful: Shakespeare is included, but he is no longer the singular savior or central authority. Baldwin belongs to Jacob’s tribe—figures who offer cultural inheritance, recognition, and unconditional love. Jacob states that this tribe gives him “a new heart” and removes the black hole in his chest. In addition, Jacob now belongs to Baldwin’s tribe and he understands the richness of the connection to his Ancestors and a whole new family of Black influencers. He is now held by a transcendent family that provides him what his nuclear family and his “friends” could not: unconditional love, witness, and a sense of belonging rooted in who he is, not what the world has told him he is.

In the final testimony, Jacob names “Basquiat Baldwin biggie” among “all the people that saved my life.” Shakespeare remains essential, but Baldwin is presented as part of the collective force that enables Jacob to survive, reclaim his right to exist, and tell his story.

Shakespeare gives Jacob language and an artistic path; Baldwin and Jacob’s broader tribe give him recognition, belonging, and a reason to live. The script ultimately shifts from an individual white-savior narrative to a communal, ancestral model of salvation. This shift redefines Jacob’s narrative and belies the play’s title and explains the function of Shakespeare in Jacob’s life. The Bard is a transition to a “higher power.”

Under Tony Taccone’s deft direction, Jacob Ming-Trent has discovered that “The Bard is a transition to a higher power”—that tribalism, relational witness, unconditional love, and ancestral connection are what actually save us, not centuries of Western civilization or the texts that carry its authority. He has learned this truth through his own spiritual encounter with Baldwin and his ancestors. Yet in the telling at the Public, he performs this discovery at his congregation rather than for them. He knows what salvation requires—relational witness, the felt experience of belonging to a tribe that sees and holds you—but the form of his testimony prevents him from offering it. His narrative is scripted, locked, unable to respond to the raised hands in the room. And so, we are left with a question: What does it mean when an artist has learned the answer to survival and connection, but the very form in which he shares that learning cannot deliver the experience itself? Is the testimony alone enough? Or does Ming-Trent’s performance ask us to recognize what we are missing—not just in his story, but in our own search for witness and belonging?