Kennedy Center award-winning playwright, theatre producer and Stetson adjunct professor Ron Song Destro will offer a free visual presentation entitled Who Really Wrote As Will Shake-speare? on Thursday, Feb. 26 at 7 p.m. at the Stetson Theatre Arts’ Second Stage at the Museum of Art—DeLand, 600 N. Woodland Blvd., across from Chaudoin Hall.

The presentation, open to the Stetson community and the local public, is a lively examination of authentic Elizabethan primary source documents, plus additional narration by award-winning actor Sir Derek Jacobi. (Destro, right, is pictured onstage with Shakespearean star Sir Derek Jacobi.)

It is based upon years of research and a series of lectures Destro has given at various venues, including Harvard University, City College of New York, Chautauqua Institution and in London and Stratford-upon-Avon. The talk is sprinkled with facts, humor, and based upon audience votes, always provides a persuasive argument.

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. 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 Mark Rylance, as well as several U. S. Supreme Court Justices. The theory was also the subject of the recent film Anonymous.

Destro’s PowerPoint presentation includes revelations that the Stratford man never claimed, and was never referred to in his lifetime, as a writer. His children were illiterate. His will tells us he owned no books and didn’t even know how to spell his own name! His original burial monument portrayed him not as a writer but as a grain merchant. Many Elizabethan references to “Shakespeare” suggest the name was a pseudonym. And the “real” poet left behind clues as to his true identity.

Destro received the Kennedy Center New American Play Award for his original work Hiroshima, a collaboration with Yoko Ono. He is the founding director of the Oxford Shakespeare Company, which brings American actors and students to New York City, London and Stratford-upon-Avon, to train and perform Shakespeare’s plays. He also hopes to create a Shakespeare Festival in DeLand.

He has trained, worked and taught with leading artists of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and the Shanghai Opera Theatre. His mentors include John Houseman, Cicely Berry and John Barton.

Destro will speak for an hour, and then open up the discussion to questions and comments from the audience. This is a cultural credit event for Stetson students with ID. For more information, contact the Department of Creative Arts at Stetson University at 386-822-7266, or email [email protected].