Name Richard Dresser Role Playwright | Plays Good Vibrations | |
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Education University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Books Alone at the beach, The downside, Better days, Splitsville | ||
Rounding Third
Richard Dresser (born c. 1951) is a popular American playwright and screenwriter, whose work has been widely performed in theatres across the United States, as well as in Europe. In addition to his plays, he wrote the book for the Broadway musical Good Vibrations and the musical Johnny Baseball. Dresser has also served as a writer and producer for multiple television series, most notably The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd.
Contents
- Rounding Third
- Personal life and early career
- Playwriting
- Musicals
- Television
- Other activities
- Filmography
- References
Personal life and early career
Dresser was raised in Massachusetts. Following college, he worked in several different jobs at various New England factories, including one position where he manufactured thighs for G.I. Joe action figures. Dresser later became a graduate student in communications at the University of North Carolina, with the intention of pursuing a career in radio; he discovered his talent for drama when he took an elective course in dramatic writing that led him to enter, and win, a collegiate play festival.
Before finding success as a playwright, Dresser did freelance writing for corporate speeches and industrial films, mainly for pharmaceutical companies. He credits his early career experiences in factories and the corporate world with inspiring his workplace comedies The Downside and Below the Belt (set in a pharmaceutical company and a manufacturing plant, respectively).
Dresser lived in New York City as of the late 1980s; in the early 1990s, he moved to Los Angeles with his wife and son (born around 1990) He and his family moved from Los Angeles to upstate New York in approximately 2000.
Playwriting
Since his early career, Dresser has been unusually prolific for a playwright. As of May 2009, he had published seventeen plays; at least fourteen full-length plays and six one-acts by Dresser have been performed for American audiences. Venues that have commonly hosted regional, national or world premieres of Dresser's work include the Humana Festival in Louisville, Kentucky; the Contemporary American Theatre Festival (CATF) in Shepherdstown, West Virginia; and the Laguna Playhouse in Laguna Beach, California.
Among his most notable early works were Better Days (premiered in April 1987 at the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays) and The Downside (premiered in November 1987 at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven). In 1995, Dresser's Below the Belt premiered at the Humana Festival, followed by a 1996 Off-Broadway production named by the Wall Street Journal as the "best new American play of the season." Since its debut, Below the Belt has found especially high popularity in Europe, including over 40 productions in Germany alone.
Perhaps Dresser's most successful play in the new millennium has been Rounding Third, his 2002 two-character baseball comedy, which was workshopped at CATF in 2001 before its 2002 premiere in Chicago, where it met with great favour from audiences. In 2003, the play was performed at San Diego's Old Globe Theater and the Laguna Playhouse before an Off-Broadway run in the fall and a return to CATF in summer 2004.
Kevin Kelly of the Boston Globe called Dresser "a ferocious playwright...(who) writes with a headlong intensity and a sense of pervasive mystery."
Dresser's latest play, The Last Days of Mickey & Jean, had its world premiere at Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell, MA in March, 2010. The play is a retirement comedy about an aging mobster on the run with his longtime girlfriend. The show is an apparent dramedy about Whitey Bulger but, of course, Dresser and his lawyers say it is not.
"Trouble Cometh" will be making its world premiere at San Francisco Playhouse in San Francisco, CA in May 2015. The show is a comic thriller about two executives locked in an existential struggle against an impossible deadline to form a reality TV show.
Musicals
Dresser wrote the book for the Broadway musical Good Vibrations, a story about teenagers in southern California, told through the music of the Beach Boys. Following a preview period, Good Vibrations opened at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre in February 2005; the show received poor reviews and closed in April after 94 regular performances.
In spring 2010, the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts premiered Johnny Baseball, a musical about the history of the Boston Red Sox with book by Dresser and music by Robert and Willie Reale. Diane Paulus directed the production.
Television
Dresser's most significant work in television has been as a writer, story editor and producer for the 1987-1991 comedy-drama The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd. He was offered the writing job by the show's creator Jay Tarses after Tarses saw one of Dresser's plays at the Humana Festival.
Dresser has also worked on the series Keen Eddie, The Job, and Madigan Men. In 2002, Dresser worked with Lorne Michaels, Chevy Chase and Tom Leopold as a co-writer and producer on an NBC sitcom pilot to star Chase as a father of three daughters. The pilot, America's Most Terrible Things, was not picked up to air on the network.
Other activities
In May 2009, Dresser delivered the commencement address at Shepherdstown's Shepherd University, which hosts CATF annually. In his address, Dresser told graduates that in the current state of the world, "A lot of things need fixing and there are a lot of people who need help. We need you, your talent, energy and optimism." He warned them that "there are no safe choices." Dresser also received an honorary degree from the university during the ceremony.