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Richard Dresser (born c. 1951) is a popular American playwright whose work has been widely performed in theatres across the United States, as well as in Europe. He has also been a writer and producer for multiple television series.

Personal life and early career
Dresser was raised in Massachusetts. As a graduate student in communications at the University of North Carolina, he was intending to pursue a career in radio when he took an elective course in dramatic writing. The course led him to enter and win a collegiate play festival, after which his ambitions shifted toward a theatre career.

Following college, Dresser had worked at several New England factories (including one job where he made thighs for G.I. Joe action figures). Before he found success as a playwright, Dresser also did freelance writing for corporate speeches and industrial films, mostly for pharmaceutical companies. He credits these experiences for inspiring his workplace comedies The Downside and Below the Belt (set in a pharmaceutical company and a manufacturing plant, respectively).

As of the late 1980s, Dresser was living in New York City. In the early 1990s, he moved to Los Angeles with his wife and son (born around 1990). They moved 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."

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 will premiere Red Sox Nation, a musical about the history of the Boston Red Sox with a book by Dresser and music by Robert and Willie Reale. Diane Paulus will direct 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 Film Festival. Dresser also worked on the 2003 Fox series Keen Eddie.

In 2002, Dresser worked with Lorne Michaels, Chevy Chase and Tom Leopold on an NBC sitcom pilot to star Chase as a father of three daughters. The pilot, which Dresser co-wrote and produced, 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.