The title How Shakespeare Saved My Life sounds grand until Jacob Ming-Trent begins to make the claim literal. The actor and writer’s solo show is not an argument for placing Shakespeare on a pedestal. It is about language as equipment: words encountered at the right moment, carried around, repurposed and used to build a way out.

The New York premiere is now in performances at the Public Theater’s Shiva Theater, where it runs through Oct. 25. Ming-Trent wrote and performs the 90-minute piece, directed by Tony Taccone. The production was co-commissioned by Folger Theatre and Red Bull Theater and arrives in New York after earlier engagements at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Folger. The Public and Red Bull are presenting it with Berkeley Rep and Folger Theatre.

Ming-Trent begins from autobiography. He describes a young person gifted with poetry but made to feel that the role of “poet” was not meant for him. Shakespeare becomes one voice in a much larger chorus that includes rappers, preachers and artists. The show invokes Basquiat, Biggie and Tupac alongside the Bard, refusing the familiar educational hierarchy in which canonical literature is medicine and popular culture is a distraction.

That mixture makes sense for an actor whose instrument is language. Shakespeare survives partly because actors keep discovering that the words are playable rather than merely admirable. A phrase can be stretched, attacked, whispered, mocked or turned into rhythm. Rap offers its own intense relationship between meter, persona and verbal attack. Put the traditions next to each other and the supposed distance between them begins to look less useful.

The room changes the story

The solo-show form makes the inquiry intimate. One performer has to become narrator, witness and a population of remembered figures while maintaining an unbroken relationship with the audience. There is nowhere for energy to hide. The form can feel confessional, but it is also technical: changes in posture, tempo and vocal placement can create a new person faster than scenery ever could.

The Public is an especially resonant New York home for the piece. The institution’s history is inseparable from Shakespeare, from Joseph Papp’s original free productions to Shakespeare in the Park. Yet it has also spent decades insisting that the canon belongs in conversation with the contemporary city rather than sealed away from it. Ming-Trent’s show takes that institutional idea down to the scale of a single life.

Its central proposition is unfashionably hopeful without being sentimental. Art cannot erase the conditions surrounding a young person, but it can supply vocabulary for conditions that previously felt nameless. A line written centuries ago can become useful not because its author foresaw a particular life but because another person decides to claim it. That act of claiming may be the deepest subject of the evening.

How Shakespeare Saved My Life is playing in the Shiva Theater at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St., through Oct. 25. It runs approximately 90 minutes without intermission and is written and performed by Jacob Ming-Trent, with direction by Tony Taccone.

Ming-Trent’s Broadway history gives the autobiography additional texture. He has spent years inside institutions devoted to scripted language, learning the peculiar discipline of saying words written by someone else until they sound urgently present. A solo piece reverses that arrangement. The performer is now responsible not only for interpretation but for deciding which parts of his own history deserve language in the first place.

Taccone’s direction has to preserve the sensation of spontaneity while shaping a piece that has traveled through several productions. That is one of the paradoxes of autobiographical performance. The story may be deeply personal, but after enough rehearsals every pause has a technical life. Craft does not make the confession less true. It creates the conditions under which truth can be repeated for strangers night after night.

The result belongs to a tradition larger than Shakespeare. New York’s stages are full of artists using canonical texts as something closer to a toolbox than a monument. Ming-Trent’s title may sound like a tribute to one writer, but the show’s broader allegiance is to language itself: the possibility that words made by other people can be borrowed until a person has enough of his own.