Public Theater

Theater review by Raven SnookJacob Ming-Trent has come to preach salvation in his vivacious memoir How Shakespeare Saved My Life. He leads us, his congregation, through a "testimony" based on the life he has led, drawing guidance from a large tome onstage—not the Bible, but the Bard. The morning after his father abandoned his family, 12-year-old Jacob walks into the wrong class and is tasked by the teacher with delivering the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V aloud, an experience that fills him with power and purpose. That world-Shakespearing discovery sets this troubled youth on a new path to become a classical actor, with several dramatic detours along the way: parental estrangement, homelessness, depression, drugs. How Shakespeare Changed My Life | Photograph: Courtesy HanJie Chow Ming-Trent’s project began as a series of personal anecdotes before being synthesized into its more ambitious current form. How Shakespeare Saved My Life explores major issues: the impact of generational trauma, the effects of racism and sizeism in the theatre industry, the liberation that comes with forgiveness. It also interpolates passages from Shakespeare and connects the Elizabethan master to more recent writers such as Biggie Smalls, Tupac Shakur and James Baldwi; Ming-Trent even spits some original rhymes, inspired by the beats of his life, with a bit of poetic license (which seems only fair, since Shakespeare took plenty of that with his histories).  How Shakespeare Changed My...

A man with thwarted artistic ambitions of his own plays mentor to his nephew, a young man who dreams of Broadway stardom, in this multigenerational gay comedy by the gifted Ryan J. Haddad (Dark Disabled Stories). Jonathan Raviv plays guncle to Haddad himself as the theater kid; the cast of seven also includes Michael Cristofer, Beth Malone, Nael Nacer, Artemis Pebdani and the ubiquitous TV actor-comedian Tim Bagley (Somebody Somewhere). Danny Sharron directs the world premiere for the Public Theater, where he and Haddad began developing the play nearly a decade ago as part of the company's Emerging Writer's Group. 

Andrew Durand plays the title character, who is born an old man and ages into a child, in Jethro Compton and Darren Clark's musical adaptation of F. Scott's Fitzgerald's whimsical 1922 short story. This British version moves the setting from 19th-century America to 20th-century Cornwall, and its acclaimed 2024 West End production won the Olivier Award for Best Musical last year. Co-author Compton also serves as the show's director and scenic designer; the rest of the London creative team is also on board for its U.S. premiere at the Public Theater, which co-stars Kelsee Kimmel as the love of Button's backward life. 

Miriam Silverman, who won a 2023 Tony for stealing The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, stars as a mad botanist bent on breaking the laws of nature—and of social convention—in a rare revival of Susan Glaspell's genre-blending 1921 play, an early example of expressionism in American drama that finds three of the men in the scientist's life converging on her greenhouse during a blizzard. Jessie Austrian directs a cast that includes her fellow Fiasco Theater mainstays Noah Brody, Paul L. Coffey, Devin E. Haqq, Paco Tolson and Emily Young as well as newcomer Amara Leonard.