Don Fried has only been writing for three years. And already he has had several plays produced in the Denver area, and written a book. He always wanted to be a writer, and it seems to be working out well for him. Two of his plays, Shakespeare Inc, and Postville will premiere this month in Denver with the Lafayette Theatre Company and the Coal Creek Community Theatre. Shakespeare Inc. won first prize in the 2009 Rocky Mountain Theater Association Playwriting Competition and was one of the selections of Paragon Theater’s 2009 Trench New Play Development Program. Postville was one of the selections of the 2009 Playwrights Showcase of the Western Region, a competition for writers from all states west of the Mississippi River. This article showcases what it is like for him to be a writer in Denver.
How long have you been writing?
I retired in 2006, I’ve been writing for three and a half years. The first play I wrote, and this was the one that had inspired me, I’d gone to college with Ken Ludwig and while I was in London, in the tube station, I saw a poster for Lend Me a Tenor by Ken Ludwig and so I called him up, because we’d kept in touch, and he happened to be coming over to London for the premiere, so I got a little bit inspired then and I said, well I can do that. One of the ideas that I came up with is, in London when people come to visit you they always bring a gift, and if they don’t have the sense to bring food it’s always something that goes on your coffee table. It’s never something you like but you keep it anyway. And one day as kind of a joke I said you know what the world needs is a database and warehousing service, storing unwanted presents for people. I decided that this was the premise for a wonderful farce. So the first play was called Present, Future. A couple of months later I had three short plays on cultural conflict, Not At Home, which was done at the Boulder Fringe Festival. And then I got a relationship with the theatre company at Lafayette, they do a lot of original work and they put a call out for scripts. So the first one I think I wrote for them was a series called Ten Thousand Waniacks. It’s about a down on his luck Wayne Newton, who tries to get a job as a Wayne Newton impersonator. Then I put another one in, they had another festival the following year, called Separated at Birth: The Lincoln/Darwin Plays. Lincoln and Darwin were born on the same day. I’d been getting a good relationship with the theater company at Lafayette, and so I submitted a full length play called Red Herring, which was based on a theatre company I’d had a hell of a time with. Then I did another play called Senior Moments with them.
You have two plays about to be performed, Shakespeare Inc., and Postville. Have you written any books?
[I wrote] Ups and Downs: The Misadventures of a Crusty Old Fart and his Bouncy Son. The title tells you exactly what you’re getting yourself into. I wrote it with my son while we were in Europe. We knew we were completely unqualified to do this. But every night I would be lying in my sleeping bag writing letters to people back home. They were long, leery, complex letters which the people that were then house sitting for me would scan into the computer and post on the internet. So there were about twenty or thirty people that were getting them back home and several more around the world. But consequently I had about a hundred and thirty pages of material once we got back. So my son and I spilt it up, he’d write a couple days worth, I’d write a couple of days worth, and then, he’d argue with me in my sections and I’d argue with him in his sections, and because you can imagine the two of us wandering around in the mountains in the rain for two months we got a bit facetious with each other. So there’s a lot of that, but at the same time it was very funny, and we learned a lot about each other, but it’s also people told us was it was kind of moving as are relationship develops.
Do you have any unique ways of getting inspiration?
I know that there are all kinds of games and trick people play. Fortunately, I haven’t had to resort to those yet, because I’m 58, so I have a lot of annoyances and things that frighten me, stored up over the years. And I have this play idea file, so all day long I’ll see something and I’ll say how can you turn that into a play, how can you exaggerate this? And when I come up with it I put it down in my idea file, so I’m never at a loss. The other thing I do that is fairly unusual I think, I start generally with the premise idea and the theme, and then I outline the entire play before I write the first line of dialogue. And that outline includes who are all the characters, what are their backgrounds, what’s their character arc, what’s their voice? Every scene, whose in the scene, what do I want to accomplish in that scene? I write pretty much from the first scene to the last scene, consequently because I have the outline, I’ve got the theme, I know what I’m doing. I do very little rewriting. The sort of received wisdom in writing is rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. For Shakespeare Inc., I probably did six hours of writing after the first draft. The play took me three months to research and four months to write. And a lot of people say they spend as much time rewriting as they did writing, I certainly do not.
What kinds of issues/topics do you most like to explore in your writing?
There are three or four things that go through my head. One, since I lived overseas for thirty years, I became a bit of a man without a country. Part of me was thinking I’ve come back to the US and now I’m at home, but the US had changed a lot in thirty years and so had I, and there was no place over there where I wasn’t home. So, Present/Future was a farce, it was something that happened to me and that’s fine. But then the next one was this Not At Home, these three plays which were about cultural conflict, about people who are not at home anywhere, or people who are at home someplace and home changes on them. And so that went for a number of my plays. Red Herring was my revenge on the cast and crew of a disastrous theatre company, and in a slightly larger view it’s the frustrations of being a playwright. You think you’re in control and you are until the moment you finish the script and then all of a sudden it’s completely out of your control and everything goes wrong. The theme of Shakespeare Inc., is why people write, and as long as it’s great art does it really matter who gets the credit, or who gets the money?
It seems to happen, that there are always things that annoy you, or frighten you, or you’re excited by, so I’ll pick up on one thing and I’ll run with that for awhile. You always need relationships; you always need conflict to write a good drama. But then there’s some other theme that sort of drives the whole play.
Shakespeare, Inc. will perform February 26th through March 13th, Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30pm, Sundays at 2:00pm with extra performances on February 28th and March 7th at 2:00pm, at the Louisville Center for the Arts, 801 Grant Avenue, Louisville, Co. Tickets can be purchased online at www.ccctheater.org or telephone 303-665-0955.
Postville will perform March 6th through March 27th, Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30pm, Sundays at 2:00pm with extra performances on March 14th and March 21st at 2:00pm, at the Historic Mary Miller Theater, 300 E. Simpson Street, Lafayette, Co. Tickets can be purchased online at www.TCLStage.org or telephone 720-209-2154.
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