Edward Graczyk, greatest recognized for Come Again To The 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, the 1982 Broadway play and movie adaptation each directed by Robert Altman, died in Sidney, Ohio, on February 11 following a prolonged sickness. He was 84.
His loss of life was introduced in the present day by his agent.
Born in Pennsylvania in 1941, Graczyk had written a number of youngsters’s performs early in his profession when, within the mid-Nineteen Seventies, he drove by way of Marfa, Texas, the small city the place the 1956 movie Big, starring James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson, had been shot. That have, together with the widespread closings of old style five-and-dime shops, impressed Graczyk to pen the work that might be his legacy.
The play, he as soon as stated, “can solely be described as the results of my very own observations and frustrations with progress that ignores a previous; the dearth of personalization and delight and the recurring want of individuals to construct facades to hide the truths of their lives. It’s the facade that makes irregular individuals appear regular and the unhappy individuals appear completely happy. A private statement which I really feel makes the individuals I write about colourful, theatrical, however most of all, sincere.”
After his transient keep in Texas, Graczyk moved to Ohio and served because the Creative Director of the Gamers Theatre in Columbus the place the primary model of Come Again To The 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean premiered in September 1976. In early 1980, the play was staged in New York Metropolis with filmmaker Altman directing in his Broadway debut.
The Broadway manufacturing starring Karen Black, Cher, Sandy Dennis and Kathy Bates was not well-received and closed on April 4, 1982, after barely two months. Nonetheless, Altman remained an admirer and determined to movie the manufacturing with the unique solid. That very same yr, the movie model received the Gold Hugo for Greatest Characteristic on the 18th Chicago Worldwide Movie Competition and Graczyk received the Greatest Screenplay Award on the Belgium Worldwide Movie Competition the identical yr.
Cher was nominated for a Golden Globe award and an LA Movie Critics award for her efficiency as Sissy, one of many long-ago five-and-dime workers and James Dean fan membership members who return for a reunion. Along with Sissy, the group’s reunion is attended by, amongst others, Mona (Sandy Dennis), who claims to have a son fathered by Dean and the mysterious Joanne (Karen Black), who has a secret of her personal to share.
The playwright adopted up Jimmy Dean with A Homicide of Crows, which opened at New York’s South Aspect Theater in September 1988. Within the early Nineties, he wrote a one-man present with Keith Carradine entitled My Time Ain’t Lengthy. By 2003, Graczyk was residing in Ohio’s Miami Valley space and was nonetheless writing performs, though in his phrases, “There are presently a number of scripts working round in my pc searching for an exit.”
His most up-to-date play, The Blue Moon Dancing, premiered in Dallas in August, 2010. All through his profession, Graczyk additionally served as a theater designer and administrator. He labored with varied establishments together with Hartford Stage Firm and Erie Playhouse.
A musical primarily based on Jimmy Dean had its world premiere in June, 2025 at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley.
Graczyk is survived by his associate of greater than years, Jeffrey Billiel, and his sister Shirley.
