Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – Suspending downward spirals through the empathetic act of transformation: Sarah Jones’s AMERICA, WHO HURT YOU? and Jacob Ming-Trent’s HOW SHAKESPEARE SAVED MY LIFE

• By drediman
• September 29, 2026
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Then there’s a pair of autobiographical solo shows that suspend psychological downward spirals — at least temporarily — through the empathetic act of transformation and storytelling. These would be Sarah Jones’s America, Who Hurt You? and Jacob Ming-Trent’s How Shakespeare Saved My Live. Here are my thoughts on these therapeutic, self-examining works.

AMERICA, WHO HURT YOU?
Theatre for a New Audience
Through October 4

Over the years, Sarah Jones (Bridge & Tunnel, Sell/Buy/Date) has established herself as one of our most undeniably talented solo performers. This fall at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood, she returns to New York with her latest one woman show America, Who Hurt You? (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED), courtesy of Theatre for a New Audience. For those of you unfamiliar with Jones, she’s garnered widespread praise for her uncanny ability to mimic mannerisms and accents with astonishing accuracy and detail. Indeed, she is a virtuosic technical performer surely inspired by and on the same level as the great Anna Deveare Smith. Despite their similar goals to provide social commentary through their theater-making, Jones’s creations register more as highly theatricalized explorations than they do straight up documentary theater (à la Deveare Smith). In her new state of the nation play, which was commissioned by Oxford University and the National Black Theatre, Jones once again puts her considerable gifts to use, ravishingly channeling, séance-like, a diverse array of people from across time, space, and imagination — namely, personified representations of America and Britain, various voices from across the country’s socio-economic spectrum, as well as a number of Jones’s own family members (e.g., her grandmother Lorraine, her outspoken cousins) — in order to stage a psychiatric intervention for the ignorant and titled teenager that is America. Such an ambitious exercise doesn’t come without a price. As the work’s sensitive conduit, Jones was clearly spent at the conclusion of her emotionally exhausting show — organically directed by Eric Ting — arguably no less resolved about her feelings about the country than at the top of the performance. It’s an unsettled feeling that strikes a note of both authenticity and urgency.

HOW SHAKESPEARE SAVED MY LIFE
Red Bull Theater at The Public Theater
Through October 25

Then there’s Jacob Ming-Trent in Red Bull Theater’s Off-Broadway production of How Shakespeare Changed My Life (RECOMMENDED) at The Public Theater’s intimate Shiva Theater (the play is also being co-produced by Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Folger Theatre). Ever the colorful performer, Ming-Trent carries the show with energy and charisma, even regularly breaking the fourth wall to encourage the audience to lean in and actively engage in his theatrically embellished autobiographical coming-of-age tale. Both exuberant and turbulent, his eventful story covers a lot of thematic ground as he recounts the experiences that have shaped his journey thus far, notably his introduction to the Bard, coming to terms and defying life challenges as a Black man, as well as delving into his complicated relationship with his distant mother and addict father. Throughout, Ming-Trent weaves in Shakespearean quotes with Baptist churchgoing rhetoric and hip-hop poetry, as appropriate, to make sense of and animate his ultimately cathartic journey. Indeed, despite the show’s title, our tireless host eventually learns to draw inspiration from beyond Shakespeare, looking deep within himself and his identity to reclaim his life. Although the show’s parable format detracts from emotional the stakes of some of the more harrowing passages, Ming-Trent works within the limits of his chosen storytelling medium with skill and verve. Since this is a one man show, the opportunity gives the immensely likable actor the ability to show off his considerable range as an actor, namely via lively portrayals of a plethora of characters from his life, as well as by candidly revealing various facets of his own layered personality — often to therapeutic effect. How Shakespeare Changed My Life has been staged by Tony Taccone, whose resourceful yet theatrical staging brings kinetic energy and variety to a genre typically associated with physically static delivery.