Playwright Pens Rubashkin Drama

By GRANT SCHULTE, Des Moines Register

A stage drama inspired by the struggles in Postville could appear in theaters this year, once a Colorado playwright finishes his script.

The play “Postville” features characters that include longtime residents, Hasidic Jews and a veteran journalist. It may also portray immigrant workers from a local meatpacking plant, based on Agriprocessors Inc.

The Agriprocessors plant in Postville was the site of a real-life immigration raid in May 2008, when federal agents detained nearly 400 workers for allegedly being in the country illegally. A top executive was later charged with harboring and hiring illegal immigrants, Agriprocessors was forced into bankruptcy, and the town suffered financially as the work force evaporated.

Don Fried, 57, a former computer consultant who worked in Europe for 30 years, said the play is a fictionalized account of Postville’s culture clash and immigration raid.

Fried said he was inspired to write the play after tuning in to a BBC radio station eight years ago in a hotel room in Switzerland. On the air was an interview with Stephen Bloom, a University of Iowa journalism professor and author of “Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America.”

“I was fascinated,” Fried said. “I thought it had incredible potential for dramatic conflict.”

Fried shelved the idea for a few years, retired in 2006, and began a new career as a playwright. He wrote a 10-page outline of the play at his home in Niwot, Colo., and bought the theatrical rights to Bloom’s book.

Fried also took classes from a Colorado group of Hasidic Jews, including some who know former Agriprocessors leader Sholom Rubashkin. Rubashkin remains in the Dubuque County jail on federal immigration-related charges. He also faces state misdemeanor charges for alleged child labor violations.

Postville City Clerk and Administrator Darcy Radloff said she was unaware of fictional works inspired by the town. Years ago, she said, a camera crew visited to film a documentary.

Fried’s play opens with small-town Postville dying. A group of Hasidic Jews arrives from New York to reopen an abandoned meatpacking plant, and that gives residents hope that Postville will survive.

But the Jews refuse to associate with residents. Tension builds. One angry resident tips off U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents about the plant’s allegedly illegal work force, not realizing that a raid will devastate the local economy.

“The people of Postville have been fighting for this town every day for nearly a century and a half,” Gabe Fergessen, a fictional feed store owner, says in the script. When the Jewish newcomers reopened the plant, he says, “Postville was in the middle of battling the biggest threat it had ever faced: Irrelevance.”

In earlier versions, before he added the raid, Fried said the play ended with everyone coming together.

“Now, it’s going to be slightly more in question,” he said. “Things have really gotten tough economically. There are some issues that everybody knows they have to address, and it’s going to be a struggle.”

Among his characters are a mayor; a local newspaper owner; a young mother and waitress struggling financially; and a veteran journalist, based loosely on Bloom, who wants to write about Postville. Four other actors would portray Hasidic Jews: a loose-cannon plant manager and his wife; a butcher; and the butcher’s wife, who opens a kosher delicatessen.

Fried has written 59 pages so far, and he said he expects to finish a roughly 80-page script this month.

Fried has produced five other plays; most have appeared in Colorado theaters. He said he hopes to travel to Iowa for a script reading to see whether local theaters are interested.

The play, he said, may center on real-life happenings, but it has been fictionalized so that he could take creative license.

“I didn’t want to end up getting sued,” Fried said. “But I also wanted the freedom to work with the characters.”