Richard Dresser (born 1951) is an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and teacher whose work has been performed in New York, leading regional theaters, and all over Europe.
The novel is an oral history of an American family from the years 2019 to 2035, dealing with life in a totalitarian state when you still have Netflix and two-day free shipping and all you've lost is your freedom.
In his early twenties he worked a variety of jobs ranging from machine operator in a plastics factory to security guard to local radio news reporter in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
This motivated him to get a graduate degree in communications at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was Program Director at the local NPR station.
[2] 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).
Venues that have hosted regional, national, or world premieres of his work include the Humana Festival at Actors Theater of Louisville, the Contemporary American Theatre Festival (CATF) in Shepherdstown, West Virginia,[5] the Laguna Playhouse in Laguna Beach, California, and the Merrimack Repertory Theater in Lowell, Massachusetts.
His most successful play in the United States is Rounding Third, a 2002 two-character comedy about two Little League coaches, which was workshopped at CATF in 2001 before its 2002 premiere in Chicago.
Kevin Kelly of the Boston Globe called Dresser "a ferocious playwright...who writes with a headlong intensity and a sense of pervasive mystery."
John Simon in New York Magazine said, "Below the Belt is a terribly serious play that keeps you steadily laughing; properly understood, it should also make you weep."
In 2008, Dresser was one of the founders of the Writers Guild Initiative, along with Tom Fontana, Michael Weller, Lulie Haddad, Jim Hart, and John Markus.
Operating under the umbrella of the Writers Guild of America, East, the Initiative's mission is to give a voice to populations not being heard, through writing workshops all over the country, including veterans, caregivers, wounded soldiers, exonerated death row prisoners, DACA recipients, LGBTQ asylum seekers, inmates at the Pendleton Prison in Indiana, victims of Hurricane Sandy, people living with HIV/AIDS, people living with chronic illness, and, more recently, nurses, paramedics and other first line responders in New York.