My Play, Myself: How Shakespeare Saved My Life and Arias With a Twist

How do you tell a life story onstage? The self is already a precariously constructed thing — start adding extra layers of performance and the questions blossom like the nodules of a fractal. Where to begin? How much truth to tell? What’s true anyway? What you felt; what you remember; what, for lack of a less slippery word, really happened? Or does all of that dwindle in the glare of the footlights, where the outline that constitutes you can blur and stretch, becoming alien and fantastic, revealing how limited the notion of “true to life” usually is?

For two very different performances of self, you can visit Jacob Ming-Trent, currently performing his solo show How Shakespeare Saved My Life at the Public Theater (in a production by Red Bull Theater), or, a couple of neighborhoods away, Joey Arias, whose 2008 cult cabaret, Arias With a Twist, is back, old enough to go to college and full of fascinating new resonance in the now-76-year-old drag artist’s meticulously accoutred body. Not a pair of shows likely to appear on a double bill anytime soon; still, I’ve found myself clicking back and forth between them internally, like lenses at the optometrist: Better now? Or now?

Let’s start with Ming-Trent. Garrulous and given to flights of rhythmic wordplay, he’s here to tell us the story of how he — a “fat, Black, and ugly” kid from Pittsburgh, he says with a touch of Richard III’s bitter irony — made it through some very hard times thanks to the dead white playwright of the show’s title. From the jump, the tone is mandatory fun with more than a whiff of evangelism: There will be audience call-and-response, and Ming-Trent will refer to us as “congregation” throughout. At one point, the audience is directed to deliver a chorus of cringiness as a series of well-meaning, presumably white folks who keep telling him, “You should play Othello!” Earlier on, a woman in the front row is recruited to stand in for a teenager named Sylvia during a sequence called “Shakespeare helped me lose my virginity.” (Ming-Trent, as his younger self, serenades her with “What light is light if Sylvia be not seen?”) And in general, when he points to us, we’re supposed to tell him to “play on!”

There isn’t another option, though I too frequently yearned for the ability to pause rather than play. Ming-Trent is a man on a mission, and with a missionary’s fervor and focus, he’s more committed to his predetermined goal than to unearthing nuance along the way. “This is not an autobiographical tale,” he says to us early on. “This show is a testimony. I’m using my stories to shine a light on bigger things.” His subtitle — included in the script though nowhere in the show’s advertising — is “A theatrical retelling based on my true stories.”

That leaves a whole lot of room for wiggling. And wiggle Ming-Trent does, painting the raw circumstances of his upbringing — a poetic addict father, a mother who kicked him out at 16, homelessness, open bigotry as he tries to pursue an acting career — with a brush so broad and hues so bold that they obscure vulnerability and uncertainty, along with the opportunity, despite the objectively rough material, for real connection. The issue isn’t that Ming-Trent owes anyone a more factual account — it’s his story to tell, but his impulse to universalize and rush forward, rather than to slow down and specify, consistently diffuses its narrative power. Those “bigger things” he’s aspiring toward get defanged: We don’t need a preacher to introduce us to these social ills as if they’re news to us. We need an actor to reveal something, to jostle our thinking and amaze our senses, to “give us more to see.”

It’s frustrating in part because snippets of something more intriguing do pop up throughout. As Ming-Trent tells it, he was introduced to Shakespeare at age 12 when he walked into the wrong room at school and found himself in “Shakespeare class.” “Congregation,” he goes on, “our Shakespeare teacher was also our football coach.” Wait! Tell me more. Who’s this guy who gets kids to recite speeches from Coriolanus by clapping and whistling and telling them to “get up off the bench” and “make a play”? Later, Ming-Trent runs afoul of his actual English teacher when he gets caught reading The Merchant of Venice in her class and then dares to appeal to her using Portia’s “The quality of mercy” speech. “No more Shakespeare in my English class!” she barks at him. Har-har. Instead of digging into the details of personality and circumstance — this school has a specific class for Shakespeare and also English teachers who are literature-hating caricatures? — Ming-Trent goes for the gag every time.

He also unfailingly opts for out over in. No one wants navel-gazing, but bombast is equally uninspiring, and it’s where Ming-Trent is most comfortable. It makes a bittersweet kind of sense: In one of the play’s most honestly moving observations, he compares Shakespeare to Biggie, Tupac, Basquiat, and Grandmaster Flash — all, he says, “urban poets reporting what they saw.” (Intentionally or not, he’s borrowing from James Baldwin, who wrote that Shakespeare “walked his streets and saw them, and tried not to lie about what he saw.”) The analogy resonates, but Ming-Trent — who found confidence in the verbal and intellectual bravado of Shakespeare — seems to have embraced only half the equation that made those artists great. He’s still fronting: The histrionic flourish, whether rap battle or soliloquy, still attracts him more than what actually powers the poetry, which comes at a higher risk. Even at the spiritual nadir of his story — in which he positions himself, who knows how accurately, underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, having escaped from a mental hospital and howling, Lear-like, against a storm — he’s so determined to out-thunder the thunder that any actual rage and pain dissipate into bluster. Not to mention the muddle of the tirade itself: It is, in fact, Baldwin that Ming-Trent is calling out to in the deluge. “Mr. Baldwin …” he shouts, “Should I seek revenge against the Western world? … Revenge!! Mr. Baldwin! Until I bring the Western world to its knees!” Infinite strata of complexity are ironed out of a spirit as brilliant and capacious as Shakespeare’s own. Somewhere, James Baldwin looks on bemused as Ming-Trent tries to turn him into a god of war.

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The irony of How Shakespeare Saved My Life’s ultimate lack of meaningful inner access is that all its external parts, from its title to its chatty direct address, seem to suggest something intimate and sincere shared to theatrical effect. It’s an irony that Arias With a Twist flips inside out: In no way does this bawdy, grunge-and-glam cabaret stake a claim to sincerity or even to much of a narrative. The collaboration of performance artist Joey Arias and the MacArthur-winning third-generation puppeteer Basil Twist (most recently known for bringing Totoro to life in London), it is, simply, a drag act with puppets. Avenue Q, however, this is not. Arias, a child of the lost East Village (to choose just one story, he and Klaus Nomi accompanied David Bowie on Saturday Night Live in 1979), is, when cinched and tucked, half Bettie Page and half Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (whose movie he was also in). With a crimson lip, jet-black mini-bangs, and matching fetish lingerie designed by Thierry Mugler, he stalks and swoons across the stage, belting the classics (from Led Zeppelin to Billie Holiday), tossing double entendres like candy at a parade, and interacting with Twist’s lurid, clever landscape of objects and creatures, from a set of writhing tentacles that seem to sprout from his back to a pair of devil puppets, six feet tall and fully engorged, who get all the way down and dirty with him to the boppy strains of “I Take It to My Baby.” (Arias is very clear, during the curtain call, that this isn’t really a solo act: Six expert puppeteers are keeping him afloat, sometimes literally, and he gives them their due.)

The show powers itself on visual ingenuity and delight (see Joey Arias get probed by puppet aliens; see him stomp through an illuminated cardboard New York like a drag Godzilla), and it certainly doesn’t flinch when it comes to hoary jokes and heavily mascara’d winks. Arias is fluent in drag-of-a-certain-era’s essential combination of fellatio shtick and “What’s a girl to do?” flutter. But behind all this commitment to the well-known — if refreshed-by-puppets — bit is a wistfulness and a feistiness that turn this revival into something stranger and more poignant than even, perhaps, its creators intended. 

That’s because, in the little downstairs theater at HERE Arts, the same black box where the show premiered 18 years ago, we are, at times, close enough to reach out and touch Arias, and at this distance, the eye shadow and foundation only partially conceal the fact that he’s seen the better part of eight decades. It’s a truth that’s sometimes impressive, as he cavorts in heels or gets spun around in a jury-rigged approximation of a multi-axis trainer; sometimes it’s a point of comedy, as when he flips his sci-fi babe ponytail and reminds us, “This is all my own hair, motherfuckers!” But then there are the moments when the show slows down, and the conscious schmaltz of the mature diva routine comes into sharper focus. Alongside the puppet kick-lines and plush psychedelic mushrooms, there’s also Arias leaning against a wall in the dark and wailing all four and a half minutes of “All by Myself.” “When I was young, I never needed anyone,” he croons, then builds to a throat-shredding caterwaul in the chorus. It’s a voice that’s less grace now than gumption, a ballerina with arthritis hurling herself into the old leaps, trusting the risk to be the reward, trusting the audience to catch her.

And we do. Ostensibly, Arias With a Twist is much less of an “autobiographical tale” than How Shakespeare Saved My Life, but in its utter disregard for the mundane, it ends up showing us more of the truth of its performer. “I want to go on an acid trip!” Arias recalls telling Twist when the latter suggested they make a show together. “I want to be on a Busby Berkeley cake with a million legs.” In the words of a fellow queen currently playing a big stage uptown, certainly a soul-sister to Arias, “Don’t dream it, be it.” Sometimes, telling the story of a life means bodying forth the form of things unknown.

How Shakespeare Saved My Life is at the Public Theater through October 25.
Arias With a Twist is at HERE Arts Center through November 1.