About Don Fried
Don being attacked by unwanted presents on the set of “Present Future”
Don moved to Niwot, Colorado in 2004, after living and working in Europe for 30 years in the Information Technology industry. He retired and started writing plays in 2006.
Don’s works include:
- Present Future, a zany full-length comedy that addresses the eternal problem of what to do with presents from friends and family that you absolutely hate. Present Future was presented at the California Actors Theatre of Longmont, Colorado in early 2008.
- Red Herring, a full-length murder/mystery comedy about a frustrated playwright who starts to play dirty tricks on the cast and crew of his latest production. Red Herring is scheduled for production at the Theatre Company of Lafayette (TCL) in Lafayette, Colorado, in the June of 2009.
- (Not) At Home, three seriously funny short plays about cultural conflict, including:
- “Happy Town, Happy People,” a humorous account of the breakdown in society in a small Eastern European country 10 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
- “An Un-American Tale,” which deals with the cultural isolation of people who are born and grow up outside of their parents’ homelands.
- “The Ambassador,” in which an American gets into a taxi in Milan and has an epic verbal battle with the driver, although neither speaks the other’s language.
- “Tough Town,” a 3-minute play in which a down-on-his luck Wayne Newton comes into the office of a theatrical booking agent and tries to get a job as a Wayne Newton impersonator. Tough Town was one of the winners of the TCL’s “10,000 Wayniacs” script competition and was presented at TCL in July, 2008.
- “The Debate,” a 15 minute play about Charles Darwin, which was one of the winners of TCL’s “Lincoln/Darwin” script competition and will be presented at TCL in February, 2009.
- Shakespeare Unlimited, a full-length historical comedy about who really wrote the works of William Shakespeare. The play was completed in the summer of 2008 and in October, 2008 was selected as one of the winners of the Paragon Theatre’s Trench New Play Development Series Contest. It will have a reading at the Crossroads Theater in Denver early in 2009.
(Not) At Home was presented at the Boulder (Colorado) International Fringe Festival in August, 2008. The production was awarded an Addison grant from the Boulder County Arts Alliance.
For current news of Don’s plays, productions and other writing activities, see Don’s Website.
