Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat…

Ron Destro: I always tell everybody, if you’re going to go see a Shakespeare play, it’s like an opera, read a summary of the play so at least you know the story. So you have to go in there prepared because Shakespeare was writing for an audience who knew the stories. In other words, he’s writing about ancient fables and, so his audience would have been familiar, certainly with the historical plays and some of the tragedies. So it’s important for an audience to know a basic summary of what they’re going to see. That way they’ll be less intimidated.

Announcer: This is StoryBeat with Steve Cuden. A podcast for the creative mind. StoryBeat explores how masters of creativity develop and produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire. So join us as we discover how talented creators find success in the worlds of imagination and entertainment. Here now is your host, Steve Cuden.

Steve Cuden: Thanks for joining us on StoryBeat. We’re coming to you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My guest today, 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 Skeptic Society. His new book, the Star, the Moon, the Sun, is an Elizabethan murder mystery, the solving of which just happens to reveal the identity of the real William Shakespeare. I’ve read the Star, the Moon, the Sun, 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. For the record, Ron and I have known one another since our days in school at USC, which I believe actually preceded the Elizabethan era. So for those reasons and many more, it’s my great honor and real privilege to welcome my friend, the extraordinarily multi-talented Ron Destro, to StoryBeat today. Ron, welcome to the show.

Ron Destro: Oh, Steve, it’s a pleasure. I’m a big fan of your podcast, and, it’s great to talk to you.

Steve Cuden: Well, it’s a real thrill to have you on the show after some time, believe me. So let’s go back in history just a little bit. Not all the way back to Elizabethan history, but your history. You’ve been at the acting, writing and directing game for a little while now. At what age were you when the bug first bit you?

Speaker A: Oh, I found receipts at the Jamestown Little Theater. when I was taking acting classes, I was eight years old, and, I was studying with a woman named, misses Osgoode, Madeline Osgood. And as it turned out, she taught Lucille ball when Lucy, who is also from Jamestown, New York, was, in high school. And so, I studied with Lucy’s teacher. And years later, when I went to USC, Lucy happened to be teaching a class, at the Sherwood Oaks experimental college.

Steve Cuden: Oh, really?

Ron Destro: And I took, a class from Lucy then. So, it sort of went full circle. But I’ve been doing it since I was eight. And in grade school, I was writing plays, directing them, putting them. Putting my fellow classmates into these little, pieces of, I don’t know what they were, shtick. And, unfortunately, I was encouraged by one of my teachers to continue doing this theater work. And they would stop the whole school where there’d be an assembly and they’d ask, everyone to sit down and watch one of my theatricals.

Steve Cuden: Oh, wow. So what was it that you were doing that got their attention? Was it very dramatic? Was it very funny? What was it?

Ron Destro: Well, you know, I don’t remember the details, but it was probably a combination. I was writing these stories and, directing my friends. some of them may have been serious. I know at Easter time, I used to invite some of my teachers and nuns over to our house where we would perform the passion play. And of course, I would play Jesus, Christ, and I would hang on the cross, and we did the last supper, the whole bit. So, I never learned a respectable trade. I’ve been doing this since I was a little kid.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s good to know. That’s what I’ve been doing since a little kid, too. So do you think of it as then a calling? Is it something that you were called to do?

Ron Destro: Yeah. Yeah. I really could never think of doing anything else. And even though my parents, my father used to urge me when I was young to consider becoming a lawyer, but, and maybe I should have followed his advice. There are oftentimes, I think that I should have, but I thought, well, you know, I could play a lawyer and I could play a doctor and everything else. Sure. And, so, I just, continued doing it in high school, local, theater, and then on to USC when I was at Sc. You remember our wonderful teacher, John houseman, certainly. Who was Orson Welles partner in mercury theater. And John, had just come over to take over the theater department and I got to work with him. And, it was an eye opening experience. I went to Los Angeles because I wanted to become, of course, rich and famous like everybody else.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Ron Destro: And I quickly learned, having done, I did some extra work and saw the kind of movies that were being made. And working with Mister Houseman, I realized that rather than wanting to become rich and famous, my goal should be, I want to be a terrific artist, a good artist. So I decided to go to London and study Shakespeare with a program, an American program at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. And so that changed my life.

Steve Cuden: So you’ve done a huge amount of theater in a variety of different capacities. I’m wondering what it is about theater that’s so special for you.

Ron Destro: well, it’s showing off, isn’t it?

Steve Cuden: Certainly is.

Ron Destro: It goes back to when we were kids and, hey, everybody, look at me because I’m not good at sports and, I’m not good at math and science, but I can make people laugh. I think I’ve, you know, I think every performer has to find, and this is what we learned in, in London. Everyone has to find their own clown, they call it, and their own type. Not to say we should not be versatile, actors. Of course we should. But you need to know what your style is or what your brand is, if you will. And then you can, once you know that, you can do a lot of other things, but it’s good to know. And I found out early on that I was a clown. And so I tend to do parts in Shakespeare, the fools and so forth. and those come easier to me than some of the more serious roles.

Steve Cuden: Because you can goof around with them.

Ron Destro: Yeah, yeah. You’ve got, you got to do what you love to do, right? I mean, that’s what this is all about, whether it’s writing, because I’ve also been writing plays my whole life. So whether it’s working at writing or directing or acting, you’ve got to do what you love to do, because there are sacrifices that need to be made sure to give to, you know, your life to this. This crazy business.

Steve Cuden: So you found your foundation, which is to play the fool, to play the clown. But in the world of creating all this work, what do you mainly consider yourself to be? An actor, a writer, director, a teacher? Or do you consider yourself to be just the whole ball of wax?

Ron Destro: Yeah, it’s. It’s funny. When I fill out a form and they ask for occupation, I never know what to write. I want to just write theater person, because I do do it all. I think I probably started writing and directing as a kid because I could write parts for myself so that I could feed my acting bug. Right. You know, you write your part for you, you direct yourself. And, so that may be how it all started. It was later on that I realized, that I could tell a story in an interesting way. And so I started to be encouraged in playwriting, and I won a couple of awards and things in my plays, so, that encouraged me. And then, taking the big leap to writing a novel, was. That was huge for me, and I’m very happy I did it. It was a very fulfilling experience. And now I’ve decided to go back and look at some of my plays and novelize them.

Steve Cuden: Very good idea. Well, you’ve been writing your whole life, so writing is not new to you, but novel writing is a little, slightly different skill. We’ll get to that a little bit later. I want to cover a couple of foundational things first. I’m just wondering, in all of your experience as a Shakespeare scholar, what was it about Shakespeare, or what we consider to be Shakespeare, that interested you in the beginning?

Ron Destro: Well, as happens with most of us, I was at first very intimidated by it because I didn’t understand most of it. And so that, you know, it’s a foreign language, and I teach my actors that if they approach it as a foreign language and figure out the keys to unlock it, once you know what you’re saying and why he’s chosen these words, then it becomes real easy because there’s the meter. It’s kind of like a musical, right? I mean, you have that musical score of the iambic pentameter, which is the heartbeat of the play, and when he changes it, when he changes that beat, then he’s directing you and saying, ah, the heart is not beating, regular thing happening. So it actually becomes easier to act once you. Once you understand what the clues are in the form itself. But I always knew he was a great writer, and I believe he was the greatest writer who ever lived. I think he expressed everything that we all feel about everything, but he did it in such an amazing way, his grasp of vocabulary. I mean, his vocabulary was double that of the next greatest writer with a large vocabulary who was John Milton M.

Steve Cuden: And then went and created a whole bunch of words that have now become.

Ron Destro: In the vernacular, yes, words and expressions. So he, you know it, but he was writing from the heart. In, other words, a lot of what he was writing came from his need to express himself. So it’s no accident that most scholars believe, for example, Hamlet is the greatest play he wrote. Well, it happens to, if you start to research the Shakespeare authorship question and so forth, you find out it may indeed be the most autobiographical play. So he’s, you know, it’s personal, and that’s what makes great writing, is you’re writing about what you know.

Steve Cuden: So you’ve just, explained that there is a way for certainly western and american actors to get into Shakespeare when they are intimidated and when they may not quite understand the words or how to express them. I’m curious what your thinking is in terms of what the biggest hurdles are for audiences to overcome who don’t know or understand or have not studied Shakespeare. What can they do to overcome that hurdle?

Ron Destro: yeah, that’s a great question. Number one, I always tell everybody, if you’re going to go see a Shakespeare play, it’s like an opera. Read a summary of the play so at least you know the story. So you have to go in there prepared, because Shakespeare was writing for an audience who knew the stories. In other words, he’s writing about ancient fables. And, so his audience would have been familiar, certainly, with the historical plays and some of the tragedies. So it’s important for an audience to know a basic summary of what they’re going to see. That way they’ll be less intimidated. But the most important thing, the reason why Shakespeare is so difficult to understand is because, I believe it’s because the actors don’t know what they’re saying. And that means the director didn’t, maybe doesn’t know or didn’t tell them. So they need to know what every word means and why Shakespeare chose this word over that word. Because he could have said anything, but he chose particular words because they have meanings. Many words he uses have two or three meanings. And he wants you to hear every meaning. He wants you to hear everything and see all of these different images, in your mind when you’re listening to these characters. But I think that’s number one, is that the actors just don’t know what they’re saying. And a lot of them ignore the meter because they weren’t trained to say it. Dee dump dee dump de dump dee dump dee dump. You know, I mean, you’ve got to know the rhythm. You don’t want to make it sound sing songy like you’re singing, because the audience will get bored with that. But you have to know underneath that that’s the heartbeat of the text. and then the other thing is that, a lot of the productions, they try to overcomplicate it, or they. They change the setting to 1930s Chicago. Or, you know, which is okay if. If you can back it up, if there’s a reason to do it. But I, think most directors need to trust the text. It’s pretty good, and people have been reading it for 400 years and enjoying it. But the actors need to know what they’re saying. Plus, don’t ignore the audience. In other words, if you go to the Globe theater today, the audience is. Many of them are standing around the stage. The stage juts out and on three sides. You have all the thousands of people at your feet as an actor. Well, this tells you the audience and the actors are in the same light because it’s an open air theater. Sure. So there’s no. So you can see the audience as you’re performing. So when you come out and you say to be or, ah, not to be. That is the question. It’s not an interior monologue. You’re talking to these people right in front of you. All those soliloquies are meant to be delivered to the audience. It’s an interaction. You look at someone and you say to be. And you look at someone else or not to be. What should I do? The audience is going to help you answer the question. That’s why a lot of Shakespeare soliloquies, they set up, a polemic. There’s this, there’s that. Now, what’s the answer? And the actor, the character needs to use the audience to help him or her solve the problem. So there’s got to be interaction.

Steve Cuden: Well, for sure. And although lots of Shakespeare is produced in ways that defies what you’re talking about, it’s produced in proscenium stages where you’re not surrounding the performers, correct?

Ron Destro: Yes. And that’s why I hate the last time I directed a Shakespeare play on a proscenium stage. What I did was, I brought a couple of hundred chairs on stage. Oh. And we performed. So the audience was sitting on stage and we were on stage. So I basically turned it into a black box.

Steve Cuden: M interesting. What do you think about modernized? You already alluded to the fact that you think it’s not a great thing, but Shakespeare’s been proven to be very malleable over time. He’s one of the rare playwrights who has been translated, scenically into all kinds of different places, including in motion pictures, and into different settings and eras and so on. What is it about him that invites people to put him in different scenarios?

Ron Destro: Well, it. You know, he’s the universal playwright because he’s writing, even though in the plays they’re. They’re very political. And he’s writing to the queen, and he’s telling Elizabeth about certain, political events that are going on. And he’s, So he was the queen’s allowed fool.

Steve Cuden: But Shakespeare was the queen’s fool.

Ron Destro: That’s right. That’s right.

Steve Cuden: I don’t think I’ve ever heard it put that way.

Ron Destro: He was as, festy as called in 12th night. He was her allowed fool. In other words, he was allowed to say and criticize the political events and the courtiers very. He. You know, Polonius is a harsh criticism of Lord Burghley. Richard III is a harsh criticism. Not of Richard III, the historical Richard, but he’s a harsh criticism of, Robert Cecil, who was Lord Burleigh’s son, and he was a humpback. So when you saw this evil humpback come out on stage in, the elizabethan day, you would immediately have thought, Oh, he’s talking about the lord treasurer, the most powerful man in England. So, he was her allowed fool. He was able to get away, whoever Shakespeare was. And, we may get to that later, but we will, you know, so whoever Shakespeare was, he was writing, and sending political messages. However, those messages are disguised under great characters, great plots, great text. So we don’t understand the ramifications, but we get the primary story of the play, which is why they’re universal. He’s writing about universal emotions of love, hate, jealousy, regret. I mean, this is why his plays have been done for 400 years. We can all identify with this. And he just puts them so heartbreakingly beautiful. So that’s why we still do them, and that’s why people have this urge to translate them into different periods. I’m not totally against it. But you don’t want it to work against the play.

Steve Cuden: Well, for sure. You need it to support the play.

Ron Destro: Yes, yes.

Steve Cuden: As should every element of the production. support the play.

Ron Destro: Exactly. Well, sometimes, you know, we all have egos in this business. We do. News flash, we all have egos. So we all want to be creatives. But in my opinion, in the theater, the playwright is the creative artist, and actors and directors are interpretive artists. The director has to interpret. What is the theme of this play? What’s the playwright trying to say? Not to say, we’re not going to be creative. We need to do this. We need to present the play in a creative way so that the audience will become engaged and fascinated and interested. But we’re primarily interpretive artists. We want to be faithful to the playwright, because if we don’t, then write your own play.

Steve Cuden: Well, sure, if you can do it. Even a quarter is good. You’re doing something pretty special.

Ron Destro: Exactly.

Steve Cuden: So, is Hamlet, in fact, your favorite Shakespeare?

Ron Destro: Well, it’s my favorite drama. Yeah, it’s my favorite tragedy, I think. I guess, being a comic, I tend to love, probably, I’ve played jaquees a number of times. Who’s the fool in as you like it? He’s the one that talks about all the world’s a stage, and I like him because he’s a, hurt fool. He’s had a tough time, and he’s cynical. And so I think, as you like it. And 12th night, which has the wonderful fool festi. So I would say those two are my favorite comedies, and Hamlet is my favorite trailer.

Steve Cuden: And the comedies are your favorite because you relate to them better.

Ron Destro: Yes. Yes, indeed.

Steve Cuden: So, being an actor is already a physically demanding thing to do. Is Shakespeare more or less so than an average standard american play?

Ron Destro: Oh, I think it is more demanding because you’ve got to get your tongue around those words, and it’s not always easy. And with modern texts, you know, sometimes we can. It’s, you know, fudge it a little bit. It’s hard to fudge in Shakespeare, although it’s funny. Every great shakespearean actor I’ve talked to has said, you know, whenever I do have to ad lib in Shakespeare, I somehow ad lib in iambic pentameter.

Steve Cuden: I assume that they’re extremely well trained.

Ron Destro: Well, it’s ingrained in you. And you. What you do is, you know, you. It’s ingrained in your training, it’s ingrained in the rehearsal, but then you forget about it in performance because, as I said, you don’t want it to sound sing songy, but if you ignore it. I’ve been to productions in New York where I’d see a production and there was just something off with it, something wrong with the way it sounded. And so I would surreptitiously pull out my. My book of whatever the play was that I happen to have with me. And I noticed, I said, oh, this must not be written in, verse. It must be, prose, but no, it was verse, but they were ignoring the verse. They were ignoring the rhythm, and that’s what threw it off for me.

Steve Cuden: So it is a form of. I’m going to say this, and correct me if I’m wrong, it’s a form of poetry without being read like a poem.

Ron Destro: Yes, absolutely. You know, it’s. It’s. Most of it is unrimed. a lot of the poems do have rhymes or a lot of the scenes will end with a rhyming couplet. But primarily, it’s free verse, which is that it’s written in ambient pentameter, but it doesn’t. It does not rhyme. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: So we. Many poems, of course, don’t rhyme. I’m talking about poems throughout history, not just Shakespeare. don’t rhyme. And yet they may not be written in iambic pentameter, but they’re still considered to be poetry. But Shakespeare is thought of in many ways as being poetic, even when it’s not rhyming. That’s what you’re saying, correct?

Ron Destro: Yes, absolutely. Because he’s chosen, done two things. Iambic pentameter simply means an I am is, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. De dump. So. And he and pentameter. Pentameter means five beats, so most lines are de dump. De dump. De dump. De dump, de dump. In sooth. I know not why I am so sad. So, the reason why the iambic works is because it’s the heartbeat. De dump, de dump, de dump. So it’s very natural for us. And five beats, ten syllables, is about how much time or length. we need to express a complete idea in English. So it was a very convenient measurement. And plays before him were written dee dump dee dump dee dumpty dumpty dun da da dump. So it sounded sing songy and rhymy and it didn’t sound real. But there’s something about Shakespeare that sounds poetic, yet it’s real. It’s heightened realism.

Steve Cuden: Good plays, good screenplays are, in fact, heightened realism.

Ron Destro: Yes.

Steve Cuden: And I think a lot of this goes back to Shakespeare, who, of course, I think, harks back to the Greeks. But nevertheless, you have. Shakespeare then forwarded it so dramatically that we’ve never, I don’t think, moved past Shakespeare in any real way, though we’ve had various movements within the theatrical world, and yet Shakespeare still remains this vital basis upon which many plays are written today.

Ron Destro: Right. And it’s interesting because what he did was he took a lot of the stories, from the Greeks and the Romans, but he broke, you know, Aristotle, came up with these rules, in the poetics. And he says, you must have a unity of time, place and action. Well, Shakespeare breaks all of those things because unity, of time meant the action of the play has to take place in one day. Well, in Shakespeare, it could jump 20 years. unity of, place has to be just in front of the palace or one location where Shakespeare moves from Venice to Verona to, you know, wherever. and then unity of action means only one plot, no subplots. But, of course, Shakespeare is filled with subplots, and that’s what makes it usually he’ll take in a dramatic play, he’ll have a comic subplot. And so he broke all the rules. But this was a writer, and this is actually what got me interested in the authorship question to be Shakespeare. this was, I tell my actors, when we first start working on a play, you have to realize Shakespeare, not only did he have double the vocabulary of anybody else, and not only did he invent words from other languages and put english words together, but he was perhaps the most well educated person of his day. He read over, because of what’s referenced in his poetry and his plays, we know he read over 200 books, many of, which were not translated into English yet. So we know that whoever Shakespeare was, he knew French, Italian, Latin, Greek. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of botany, physics, biology, chemistry, history, mythology. He just was this amazing person. He knew the law. He knew the inside of the court. He knew how court intrigue worked. He was dust with the crown with, kings and queens and princes. So this was someone who had to have an amazing education. And that’s why he was just so far above all of his contemporaries. I mean, he was considered in his.

Steve Cuden: Own day, and yet he understood, if he understood affairs of the heart probably better than anybody ever.

Ron Destro: That’s right. Exactly. Exactly.

Steve Cuden: So that’s what sets him, that’s really what sets him apart. All of what you just said. Plus, on top of it, he’s a highly emotional writer.

Ron Destro: Yes. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Speaking of that, let’s talk for a moment about the sun, the moon, the star.

Ron Destro: Okay.

Steve Cuden: Without giving away the book’s wonderful twists and turns, tell the listeners what it’s about.

Ron Destro: Well, I, you know, years ago, I was. I was taking a course at Columbia University from Kristin Linkletter, who’s a wonderful voice teacher. And Kristen sort of got me turned down to the Shakespeare authorship question. And so I, quickly realized that she and, all of these writers, Emerson Twain, Henry James, Walt Whitman, they all doubted that Shakespeare was this simple man from Stratford upon Avon. So I thought it was interesting. This is the most famous writer in history, and we seem to know so little about him. And what we do know tells us that he probably was not the writer. He had a similar name, will Shaxpur from Stratford upon Avon. But when we look at his life and the facts of his life, it just doesn’t jive with, what’s in the plays and the poems. And so I became intrigued. And so for about 20 years, I researched this story.

Steve Cuden: Where did you do it?

Ron Destro: Where did I do it? Well, I was, alone in the woods of Connecticut with the deer and the ducks and my wife. And, I, sort of resigned from life for five years and started reading. And so this is before the Internet was big. So I started reading everything I could about the authorship question. There are a lot of wonderful books out there. And so I. Then I went to see Shakespeare in love, the movie.

And I realized that what was so great about Shakespeare in love is not that it’s about Shakespeare, but it’s just a great romantic comedy, and it happens to be about Shakespeare. So I said, maybe I could tell the story. You know, I’m reading all these books that kind of explain to me who was the real Shakespeare. And. And, you know, what, how he came to write this and so forth. And I thought, I would love to write, like, a novel, a mystery. I actually started it as a screenplay 20 years ago. and I wanted to take all of these dry facts, and instead of writing a polemic about this was Shakespeare. And let me give you the argument. instead of doing that, I wanted to write something interesting for a general audience. A murder mystery, an elizabethan murder mystery, the solving of which just happens to reveal that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare and it was someone else. And. And so I wanted to write a book that explained how this happened and more importantly, why this had to happen. And so I wrote this and I took advice from one of my mentors, Malcolm Mackay, who’s a director at Shakespeare’s Globe and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. And he’s a wonderful writer. And Malcolm told me early on, as I started to write this, he said, make sure you’re not writing a book trying to prove who Shakespeare was. You’re writing an interesting mystery, a story. So make sure everything you put in that book supports your murder mystery. And so I took that to heart, and, I got more wonderful advice from a friend of mine, Keith Cole, who I knew, at RAda in London. And Keith said, the thing about mysteries is it’s the greatest ones will tell you whodunit on the last page. And not only that, but if you can do it in the last paragraph or maybe even the last sentence of the last word. So I kept that in mind. And I have a lot of spoilers and reveals throughout the book, but, I try to, you know, I tried to delay them as long as I could. And so my objective was to write about what I know, which I think is important for all of us, and to write, tell a great story that people will want to. Want to turn those pages and, not worry about trying to prove my argument, but just telling an interesting story with interesting characters. And, so, as I wrote this, two things were very important for me. And one was after starting the project 20 years ago as a screenplay, and then nothing ever happened to it because there was another script, in Hollywood at the same time. So we decided not to do it. In that time, I became a father. And fatherhood is very important to me. I have a great son. And not only that, but fatherhood, I realized, was a very big part of the Shakespeare story and the identity story. So fatherhood and sacrifice and sons play a big part in this novel. And also the other thing that happened was I was looking at the world’s reaction to Covid and some of the characters in the book and in the history of Shakespeare and the theater world, were affected by the plague. And so I don’t dwell a lot on that in the book, but there are a couple of pages that I couldn’t have written if Covid hadn’t happened.

Steve Cuden: Sure. Absolutely. Well, I, for one, think that it’s mission accomplished. You did what you set out to do.

Ron Destro: Oh, thank you.

Steve Cuden: And I do think it. I would like to hope to think that it will become a movie someday because it should be a movie someday, the way you’ve written it, it is a movie story. It has all that feeling to it. And so what I’m wondering about.

Ron Destro: Oh, by the way, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but my big joy in this project was getting, sir Derek Jacoby to do the audiobook brilliant of the novel. And so I’m hoping that people will hear that. And as you hear that, you can sort of see a movie in your mind, I think, because he’s just so wonderful.

Steve Cuden: Well, you, went and got one of the great actors of all time, let alone one of the great shakespearean actors of all time. But here’s the question, which completely. When I started to read it, I actually didn’t know what I was about to read. I sort of had a vague clue, but not really. But I do not understand, despite all of your training and all of your experience, how in the world you wrote this thing as if you were in the elizabethan era. Please explain how you went about doing that, because you are really good at it and you are consistent at it. It’s something where I kind of expected to find some passages or chapters that kind of fall apart that don’t feel like they’re elizabethan, and you are consistent all the way through. How in the world did you do that?

Ron Destro: Well, a couple of things. I think, having done Shakespeare for most of my life, I can hear those voices. So I think that helped. I have directed. I think I’ve directed between 40 and 50 Shakespeare plays. Wow. Different productions. So I hear Shakespeare’s characters voices in my head. And so that was part of it. And also using it was funny because as a writer, as I was sitting down, I would go through it page by page. And every time I came upon a word that sounded modern, I have an app that contains the entire Oxford English dictionary.

Steve Cuden: Oh, wow. Okay.

Ron Destro: And it’s on my computer as well. So I would look up every word I had a question about, which were hundreds, and I could see when the first usage was recorded. So if it didn’t fit, like, for example, the word plan, let’s plan this out. Let’s make a plan that is more contemporary, that was not elizabethan. So I replaced that word with stratagem or something, you know, that. But I wanted to also make sure that I didn’t want the book to sound difficult for a modern reader. And so, the first draft was a little too elizabethan, so, and I asked a few friends to read it, and they said, you know, I gave them the first chapter and they said, okay, what does this mean? What does that mean? So I realized I wanted to be true to the period, but also, I needed to make sure I wasn’t making it sound foreign. And so I hope I accomplished that.

Steve Cuden: I definitely think you did, because I will tell you, with all due candor, I have trouble reading Shakespeare most of the time. I’m not a Shakespeare scholar. I’ve not performed in a Shakespeare. I’ve never actually, well, that’s not true. I have worked on Shakespeare plays, but I have trouble reading Shakespeare. I find it difficult to do. But I had no trouble reading your book.

Ron Destro: Oh, great. Well, that’s good to hear.

Steve Cuden: I mean, no trouble. I got it immediately that you were not writing as if you were Robert Ludlum or Stephen King. You were writing as if you probably were Shakespeare writing back in the day, only you weren’t writing a play. You were writing a novel, which was very, compelling to read. It was very interesting reading. And so it fascinated me that you did that. And I was really stunned that you pulled it off all the way through. I thought, okay, this is really going to go fall apart at some point.

Ron Destro: Yeah. well, I think, for me, what the thing I miss about this, because I’ve started writing my next play, which is set in the 1980s. So my next novel based on a play that I wrote, but it’s set in the 1980s, and I don’t have my narrator, Arthur Taverner, who is the narrator of the star, the moon, the sun, is this drunken, portly poet, Arthur, taverner, who I kind of imagined when I was writing it to be Derek Jacoby. So that’s why it was so easy to have him, you know, in.

Steve Cuden: My mind, as that helps, doesn’t it, to have an actor who you’re familiar with actually in your mind’s eye as you’re writing.

Ron Destro: That’s right. And he’s kind of like a Falstaff character. So I, as soon as I hit, upon having Arthur as a narrator, it all became easy. It almost I swear to you, it almost wrote itself. Because Arthur is so fun and so charming, and he doesn’t always use the right words, and he goes off on a lot of tangents. But I found him so interesting that I just feel I was blessed in finding, his voice. And so now, as I’m writing other things, I say, oh, I sure miss Arthur’s voice. So I’ve got it. I’ve got to create another narrator who’s just as interested.

Steve Cuden: So from the moment that you actually started to really construct the book. How long did it take you overall to write it? I know you researched it for 20 years, but I’m talking about the actual writing of the book.

Ron Destro: Well, the writing of the book. It took about one year to write it and just about every day. And then it took about one year to get an agent after 539 emails.

Steve Cuden: Oh, my goodness.

Ron Destro: Yes. And I used.

Steve Cuden: You’re not determined or anything, are you, Ron?

Ron Destro: I was determined to get this. I’m very proud of this. And I wanted to get it out there. It’s funny, because once I got the agent, we had a couple of offers from publishers. It’s small, independent publishers, and we didn’t take the first couple. it’s funny, I thought of F. Murray Abraham, who is a good friend and a wonderful person. Murray told me that when he received the Academy Award for Amadeus, Shirley Maclean came up to him and handed him the award. And she whispered in his ear. And I said, what did she say to you? He said, shirley said, don’t take the first offer you get. I kind of remember that. So I said, you know, you’ve got. It’s my first offer from a publisher, but let me weigh this. And as it turned out, we went down quite a few publishers until we got a good deal. Because the sticking point was the audiobook. I was determined a lot of publishers don’t want to put up the money for an audiobook, especially the money that it requires to pay a big star to do an audiobook.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Ron Destro: So, they were willing to publish it, but they said, look, you could put up the money for the audiobook and we’ll take half of the profits. And I said, I’m not sure about that, because I decided to produce the audiobook myself. So, anyway, we found a publisher who said, look, audiobook is your baby. we’ll just put the book out. So, ebook and paperback, we’ll take care of that.

Steve Cuden: Well, that worked great. So here’s what I’m curious about. I asked lots of authors about the reception of notes, the giving of notes, but more importantly, the reception and the dealing with notes, because this is part of the process of being a writer, is the revision process. Now, you’ve written a book that’s specifically in a kind of language that most publishers would never see in their entire lifetimes. So my question is, did you receive notes from an editor at a publishing house? And if so, how did you deal with them?

Ron Destro: Well, yeah, that was difficult because the notes that I received were, if they were based on just word count and publishing things, you know, bookish kind of notes. I respected that because I’ve never written a novel. I didn’t know how many words. My first draft was 120,000 words. And. Yeah, and then I whittled it down to a hundred thousand words because a lot of people wouldn’t read it. If it’s more than 100,000, that’s the limit for a novel. And then finally, it’s funny, what really made me cut the words down, it ended up as 81,000, and which is a nice, manageable size. The reason I did that was because Derek Jacoby is 84 years old, and he, you know, he can only do so much now in so many days. And I, you know, I couldn’t afford to hire him for a whole month. So there was a financial consideration, which is what publishers think about, too.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Ron Destro: And, you know, if the book is too long, you know, it’s going to cost us more money. So, now, my advice sometimes to writers is write as if you want a big star to do the audiobook and you have to pay them by the day.

Steve Cuden: So that’s very good advice, I think.

Ron Destro: I think so because you have to have a practical limit. And as it turned out, I didn’t cut anything that, I was unhappy with cutting. And so those sort of, writing notes I took seriously. there were some notes, though, that made me say, I’m not sure that person understands, because this is a complicated story and period and so forth. So there came to be a point where I just said, you know what? I don’t want to cut it anymore. And they respected that and said, okay, that’s fine. It’s your baby.

Steve Cuden: Well, once you’ve gotten it down to 81,000 words and you had it at a considerable length more, then, you know, you’ve cut a lot of stuff out and probably it’s down to where it belongs. And again, I had no trouble working my way through the book quite quickly, which, when I started to read it, went, oh, this is, this is Shakespeare. But then I had no trouble reading it at all, which was really great. So I’m curious, as a longtime actor, how do you think your ability as an actor and a director and a playwright influence the way you were able to write the book?

Ron Destro: Well, I think the book, like you said, it. It’s easy to envision it as a film. quite. It’s very theatrical, I think. And maybe because of my background in writing theater and knowing you’ve got to have certain climaxes and so forth, and curtain lines at the end of a scene or at the end of a chapter, you want. You want to, Something to be said so that they say, wait, I can’t put this down after I have to go on and read the next chapter. So I think that that helped me and informed me, just like we always tell directors, take an acting class. So, you know, if you’re going to give a direction, you need to know what that feels like on the other side. if you’re expecting too much from an actor or if maybe you’re not phrasing the direction properly. And actors should take directing classes. And so it all fed into the other. And so I think they all fed into the novel. To make the novel theatrical. And, of course, writing plays, the thing is, you don’t. For example, I, just. I took a play that I’d written. It’s set in India. It’s about a dowry burning in India. Very seriously, important subject. So I decided to novelize that. I just went page for page and wrote it, the dialogue. Because the play is all dialogue and there’s no description. Very little description. It’s all dialogue. So I wrote all the conversations as if it were a novel. Added little things here and there. Well, it’s. It’s only 20,000 words.

Steve Cuden: So that’s a novella.

Ron Destro: Yeah, exactly. So I’ve decided now I’ve got to go back and color it. And. But not only with description. I mean, I. It’s. I’ve got a. I found an interesting subplot and another story and so forth. So it’s going to become a new work with. With the. The skeleton of the play. But there, the. Yeah, that’s the difference. Plays are, you know, we just see the end result. We don’t get the descriptions of the characters, the descriptions and the smells and the colors and that you have to put into a novel and make it interesting.

Steve Cuden: Well, that you did in spades. You could really feel and smell the. The very different environment of Elizabethan England than what we experience in today’s modern world. You could taste it. You could smell it. It came pouring off of the page. Did you work with a certain audience in mind as you were creating it?

Ron Destro: I always. I kept reminding myself, I want the average person who may know very little or nothing about Shakespeare to enjoy this story. So it. Yeah, I was not writing it for. I could write other books for my colleagues in the Shakespeare industry and the Shakespeare masterclasses. That sort of did that, you know, the book. My first book you mentioned. But, no, I wanted to. I wanted to stick with. This is for people who want to read a good murder mystery.

Steve Cuden: And that you did it is a good murder mystery. Do you think that it was more challenging to write than a play?

Ron Destro: Oh, yes. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Why? Well, because you had to put all that description in.

Ron Destro: Yeah. it’s knowing. It’s trying to be judicious with that. you know, how much do I need to describe each character? Is it necessary to describe a character? Or how much of the scene do I have to describe?

Steve Cuden: Do you find that creating dialogue was helpful in then creating scenes in the book? Did that make it easier for you because you’ve written so many different plays?

Ron Destro: Yes, the dialogue came rather easily. what my fear was was that I didn’t want it to sound like a play or look like a play. On the page was just two characters going back and forth. When that does happen, there are a couple of scenes I have these two characters, Mutt and Boyle and their servants. And they drink more than they serve. And they’re at the, court parties. And their job was to give all the gossip on the courtiers who were president and queen Elizabeth and so forth, and do it in a very funny way. So those are the only two sections, I think, in the book where there is a playlike feel. Because it’s just this page or two of two funny guys going back and forth. But, I wanted to be sure that I didn’t do too much of that. Because then it would turn into a play rather than a novel. That’s where Arthur’s voice helped, because I’m always remembering he’s telling the story.

Steve Cuden: Do you think that your years and years of directing so many productions enabled you to envision how this would play out as if it was on a stage or in a movie? Because I think that’s the. What I think was great about the book is it felt very visual and very theatrical and. And yet it felt natural in the way that you wrote it. Do you believe that being a director helped you to do that?

Ron Destro: That’s. That’s a difficult question. I don’t know. I think it was being a playwright. It’s funny, I don’t think it was being an actor because I. I couldn’t see myself in any of the roles, really.

Steve Cuden: Not in one, any of them.

Ron Destro: I mean, I can now. I mean, I know when they make the movie deal, I’m going to say, wait, I want to play such and such. Not a major part just, I always like the small parts. My favorite role recently was the gravedigger in Hamlet. I loved doing that. So, yeah, I didn’t envision myself. It’s funny, I didn’t see a lot of like, actors either, except for Jacoby as the narrator. But other than that, I saw new creations I was, I was making, and maybe I thought of them. So many of them are historical characters, so I knew what Horatio looked like. I knew what, Shakespeare looked like. And, Anthony Mundy and all these, these John Lilly and Ben Johnson, because I’ve seen portraits of them. So I think that helped. But I’m not sure if. I suppose subliminally being an actor and a director, it all helped.

Steve Cuden: I would expect that it all is kind of a soup that at some point for you it’s all of a piece, but it’s many, many parts to make. that bouillabaisse, I guess it would be. Do you think.

Ron Destro: You know, what was weird was, and I, you know, we always, we often hear writers say this, and I never believed it, but I have to say, a lot of it was written, and I don’t know how it was written. As if I. Oh, that’s common instrument.

Steve Cuden: Yes, you’re there. A lot of writers will say that it was coming through you.

Ron Destro: Yes.

Steve Cuden: You were just a conduit for it.

Ron Destro: Yeah. And I’ll look, you know, I’ll, write it and I’ll look at a page and I’ll say, wow, that’s funny. How did I, how did I think of that? Where did that come from?

Steve Cuden: And here’s the unique thing, and you’ve probably seen this with your plays. The further you get away from them, the more they seem like I didn’t write that.

Ron Destro: Yeah, yeah.

Steve Cuden: Have you ever looked at an old, old work of yours, something from way back when and think, I don’t remember having ever written that?

Ron Destro: Yeah, sometimes I say, I don’t want to admit having written that.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s a whole other story. Was there anything that you learned in your time, putting together the Shakespeare masterclasses that you learned from some of these great experts that you wound up putting in the book that you snuck in?

Ron Destro: Well, yeah, yeah, there. Because I’m writing about Shakespeare’s company of actors, Burbage and Hemings and Kemp and Condell. there were a lot of funny little moments where I could make fun of. I remember talking to Jeremy Irons and, and Jacobi. And if, this comes up a lot, how shakespearean actors, Frank Langella I remember, they all talk about how difficult it is to apply method acting to Shakespeare.

Steve Cuden: Wow. Interesting.

Ron Destro: Yeah. So, because, you know, I think method acting fits Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. But, and these kind of realistic sort of things. But the problem, Shakespeare’s a style just like musical theater. So you can’t be naturalistic. You’ve got to be truthful and honest. But you can’t just sort of say, it and mumble a line and choose something and scratch yourself. And, you know, you can’t be self indulgent. And a lot of british actors look at method actors as being self indulgent in that way. And that doesn’t help Shakespeare. So, I put a little joke in about method acting in the play. although it’s kind of disguised, so you sort of have to find it. But, you know, you surely didn’t.

Steve Cuden: Call it method acting in the book, did you?

Ron Destro: Well, they’re doing, All’s why that ends well. And one of the actors, I think it’s Hemings, is playing Bertram and Shaxpur, will Shaxpur is kind of directing it and saying, now, you. Your father just died. Here’s the new play. Your father just died. And you’re gonna go to the queen. you’re gonna go to the king and become, awarded the crown. And he’s. And Hemings interrupts and says, well, what did he die of? And he said, well, tis not in the play. He says, well, surely you must know. He says, no, I don’t. It’s not in the play. well, I have to know what. I have to know how the old man died. How am I going to play it? And it says, Hemings searching for a method to his madness. It’s kind of snuck in a little bit.

Steve Cuden: Ah, that’s very good.

Ron Destro: I’m very proud with the little words that I snuck in here and there. One of my favorites is, you know, the Globe Theater. The modern Globe theater was rebuilt thanks to the efforts of an american actor named Sam Wanamaker.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Ron Destro: And Sam, he went to London 50 years ago. And he said, there should be a globe. Where was the Globe? And they’d say, oh, it’s right here at this car park. He said, I want to build. I want to raise money. So he raised money. They rebuilt the globe. So, there’s a little. I give a little tribute to him in the page where it says that when the guys were building the Globe theater, out of an old theater, that it, was built by two brothers Thomas and Samuel Brent and Thomas wanted a theater maker to make it like the old theater, and Sam wanted a maker to make it. Oh, very clever, you know, so that’s the tribute to Sam Wanamaker.

Steve Cuden: Very clever. So I need to ask you a practical question. Totally practical question. Most acting, directing, and ultimately writing to produce something of quality comes with various built in pressures. You have pressure, time pressure. You have the pressure of actually being in front of people on a stage, et cetera, et cetera. How do you deal with pressure in your life and career?

Ron Destro: Well, you know, it’s funny. When I started the. I, started a nonprofit Shakespeare theater in school called the Oxford Shakespeare company in New York. And the first year, we would do, a month of classes. So I’d get students who were interested in performing Shakespeare. We would train for a month, just a couple nights a week, four weeks. At the end of the month, we would put on a Shakespeare play. So they’re memorized, ready to go. End of the month. The following Monday, we’d start a new one. First year, I did eleven Shakespeare plays in one year. Wow. So that was a lot. So we were a, we were a pressure cooking factory. You know, we were just cranking them out. And a lot of the actors would return the next Monday and then do another one. And do another one. Well, then we started these, we now continue to do these summer ten day workshops. So what happens is, talk about pressure. Actors audition on video from all over the world. They send me, you, know, if I say, we’re going to do. We’re going to do Hamlet in Elsinore, Denmark. So they all send me videos, audition videos, okay. I say, look, you’re going to do, you can play Polonius, you can play Hamlet, Horatio, Gertrude. So I assign them a part. If they’re interested, I say, okay, send in. We have a tuition. Because what they do is I got some of my old teachers from the Royal Academy of dramatic Art to come and teach them during this ten week, summer, workshop. I direct the plays in the morning, the teacher teaches them in the afternoon. And at the end of one week, we go to the historic site and we put on the play.

Steve Cuden: Oh, that’s fast.

Ron Destro: So they have to come memorized, right? We audition months in advance. So I say, show up in Paris. This is the address, this is the date, come memorized. And boom, we just jump into it. So there. You know, I. I don’t even know the meaning of pressure anymore, but you.

Steve Cuden: Just handle it by just doing it.

Ron Destro: Yeah. You just that. I think that’s the key, because you learn by doing. And, so, you know, they have several months to learn lines, and sometimes I’m in the place, so I have to. I have to learn my lines. But the more you challenge yourself, the more you can do it.

Steve Cuden: I think that that’s absolutely true. We have been having the most marvelous conversation about Shakespeare and playwriting and book writing and all the wonderful things that Ron Destro has been doing his entire career, for a little more than an hour now. And I’m just wondering, in all of your experiences, do you have a story you can share with us? I’m sure you have more than one of something that’s happened to you that’s either weird, quirky, strange, offbeat, or just plain funny.

Ron Destro: Well, yeah, Oh, boy, a lot of them. Well, I remember when we were at USC and John Houseman was directing a production of the caucasian chalk circle. M so I really wanted to be in that play, starring, of course, as Azdak, one of the lead characters. And I was totally not right for that role. it’s funny, it ultimately went to William Allen Young, the wonderful actor who.

Steve Cuden: I’ve also worked with. Yes.

Ron Destro: Yeah. Oh, what a great.

Steve Cuden: In the crucible. We performed together in the Crucible.

Ron Destro: Oh, you did? Wow. Wow. Well, I. I so wanted this part, but anyway, I went to the audition and Mister Houseman is there. We were all intimidated by him. We didn’t know he was really a pussycat, but he had that serious demeanor and that bow tie. I once asked him, mister M husband, why do you always wear the bow tie? He said, because the long dangly ones get in the soup. But. So anyway, I had memorized the Asdaq monologue and I was there to impress him. So I did the audition. I went in, did Asdaq, and he said, Oh, okay, good. can you do another monologue, something else? And I thought for a second and I said, no, I’m sorry. He said, oh, surely in the back of your mind there must be. You must have something memorized. And I said, I’m sorry. No, he was very kind. He said, go in the lobby, take 20 minutes and come back. So he saw me again. I learned a new speech. He gave me a smaller role in the play, and, he used to call me the major minor domo, because I had this little part. But it was a fun part. It was a good part. So anyway, as we were nearing the end of the run, word got backstage that mister Houseman’s agent was in the house. Oh, boy. And that he was also the agent of Jack Nicholson. Now, this was not long since an agent came to see a show at USC and discovered, Madeline Smith. Smith, who was discovered in a play. And she then was given the lead opposite John Travolta in urban cowboy.

Steve Cuden: And the director of that play, which was a shakespeare, was John Houseman.

Ron Destro: John. Ah, John Houseman, that’s right. So I knew this was my chance. The agent was in the house. So I went on that evening, I tell you, all the stops were out, no holds barred. I gave the performance of a lifetime because I was auditioning for this guy in the audience. Well, after the show, I saw Mister Houseman’s assistant, Louie. She started to walk toward me backstage. Ah. I was ready to pack for Beverly Hills. I knew she was headed right toward me. She said, Ron? I said, yes. She said, mister Houseman has a message for you. I said, oh, really? What is it? She said, the message is, mister Helsman wants to know what took you so long. And of course, the moral of the story is you got to play every performance as if mister Houseman’s agent is in the audience.

Steve Cuden: Exactly. That’s very funny. So, last question for you today, Ron. you’ve already given us a tremendous amount of advice throughout this entire episode, and I’m just wondering if you have a single solid piece of advice or a tip that you like to give to those who are starting out in the business, or maybe they’re in a little bit and trying to get to that next level.

Ron Destro: All right. George Burns said, come watch a fellow like me perform. Carl Reiner said, if you stick around long enough, eventually they’ll build a theater around you. Maury Amsterdam gave me one of my favorites. When you start out, be as mean and miserable as you possibly can. That way, when you become a big star, nobody can say you’ve changed. I asked Groucho Marx if he had any advice. He said, yeah, give him the finger.

Steve Cuden: That’s really funny advice, Ron. And I just, you know, this has been an absolutely spectacular hour on StoryBeat. I, can’t tell you how much I appreciate your being on the show with me today, and I greatly appreciate your wisdom and your shared experiences and your friendship throughout all these years.

Ron Destro: Yeah, Steve, it’s been, it’s been great knowing you and listening to your podcast, and it’s been great talking. Thank you so much.

Steve Cuden: And so we’ve come to the end of today’s StoryBeat. If you liked this episode, won’t you please take a moment to give us a comment, rating, or review on whatever app or platform you’re listening to? Your support helps us bring more great StoryBeat episodes to you. StoryBeat is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartwear, Radio, Stitcher, Tunein, and many others. Until next time, I’m Steve Cuden, and may all your stories be unforgettable.