Ron Destro, Writer-Actor-Director-Teacher-Episode #270

Storybeat with Steve Cuden

Ron Destro is an award-winning writer, actor, director, and teacher. Trained in the US and UK, his mentors have included Royal Shakespeare Company founder John Barton, Oscar-winner F Murray Abraham, TV legend Lucille Ball, painter Pierre Matisse, and teachers at the Iowa Writers Workshop. He received the Kennedy Center New American Play Award for his work, Hiroshima, for which Yoko Ono wrote the original score.

He runs the nonprofit New York and London summer-based Oxford Shakespeare Company, which trains actors and presents Shakespeare plays in historic locations, including Hamlet in Elsinore, Macbeth in Birnam Wood, and Richard III on Bosworth Field.

He’s lectured on the Shakespeare authorship question at Harvard University, Chautauqua Institution and the Edinburgh Skeptics Society.

His new book, The Starre, The Moone, The Sunne, is an Elizabethan murder mystery, the solving of which just happens to reveal the identity of the real “William Shakespeare.” I’ve read The Starre, The Moone, The Sunne and can tell you it’s uniquely entertaining, especially as Ron has written it as if he was an author living in the Elizabethan era. Funny, dramatic, raucous, and filled with an amazing theatrical energy, I highly recommend it to you.

And if you’re into the Bard of Avon, please check out Ron’s excellent book, The Shakespeare Masterclasses, featuring fantastic insights from 13 of the world’s greatest classical actors.

Among some of Ron’s more unusual achievements, he taught Christopher Reeve to smoke, was told by Groucho Marx to give somebody the finger, and nearly ran Michael York off a mountaintop in a toboggan.
www.rondestro.com