Kennedy Center award-winning playwright, theatre producer and former SUNY Fredonia theatre student Ron Song Destro, '76, returned to his alma mater and offered a free visual presentation titled, “Who Really Wrote As Will Shake Speare?” on Tuesday, Sept. 7 at 4 p.m. in Room S-104 of the Williams Center.
The presentation, which is a lively examination of authentic Elizabethan primary sources, is based upon years of research and a series of lectures Professor Destro has given at various venues, including Harvard University, City College of New York and Chautauqua Institution.
Siding with many of the world’s greatest authors, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry James and Mark Twain, Destro sets out to disprove the traditional theory that the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare came from the pen of the humble man from Stratford-upon-Avon.
He proposes a different author, who used the name “Will Shake Spear” as a clever pseudonym, created the works. In addition to well-known writers, proponents of this theory include world-renowned theatre people such as Orson Welles, Leslie Howard, John Gielgud, Derek Jacobi, Kenneth Branagh, Michael York, and former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe in London Mark Rylance, as well as several U.S. Supreme Court Justices.
Destro received the Kennedy Center New American Play Award for his New York produced play Hiroshima, in collaboration with Yoko Ono. He received degrees from the University of Southern California and Brooklyn College, and a certificate from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art Marymount Programme in London.
Destro teaches Shakespearean acting in Tribeca, is the founding director of the Oxford Shakespeare Company, which plans to build a Globe theatre center in Lower Manhattan, and is artistic director of the OSC’s performance company BOAR.
The OSC, which recently awarded the Oxford Prize to actor Al Pacino, performs Shakespeare regularly in New York City and in Hyde Park, London. They also have the honor this fall of presenting the American premiere of “Double Falsehood,” a play just recently accepted into the Shakespeare canon by editors of the Arden Shakespeare series.
