"Shakespeare: This Could Be True" staged reading by Pittsburgh Shakespeare in the Parks

“Shakespeare: This Could Be True”, a new one-act by Charles David “Stoney” Richards.

“This Could Be True is a one-act play about an Actor confined to an insane asylum as he suffers from Misidentification Syndrome and Auditory Hallucinations believing he is a member of Shakespeare’s company. He thinks the people speaking to him are someone else. When he learns of Shakespeare’s death, he becomes further obsessed in getting John Heminges and Henry Condell (who led printing of the First Folio) to publish Will’s plays before ‘they are scattered by the winds of time.

Richards muses: “I’ve always been impressed by the storytelling talent of William Shakespeare. As a playwright he was a remarkable rewrite artist. He was able to find stories that many people of his day were already familiar with; Hamlet, Henry V and Macbeth, to name a few. He rewrote them with his own sense of drama , responsibility and the conflicts of life, death, love, all subjects that appealed to his audience’s taste. And this came to mind with “ This Could be True.” I think Will was not afraid to ask, ‘What if?’”

The two sides battle, but the medical team played by Aaron Crutchfield and Anna Singer believes they have found a way to help the mental torture of this actor, portrayed by playwright Richards).

Through the course of this play much is revealed about Shakespeare, the real life character Jon Sincler and the mental maze this illness can create in the human mind.