Edward Graczyk obit

Edward Graczyk Dies: ‘Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean’ Playwright Was 84

 

He was not on the list.

Edward Graczyk, best known for Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, the 1982 Broadway play and film adaptation both directed by Robert Altman, died in Sidney, Ohio, on February 11 following a lengthy illness. He was 84.

His death was announced Monday by his agent.

Born in Pennsylvania in 1941, Graczyk had written several children’s plays early in his career when, in the mid-1970s, he drove through Marfa, Texas, the small town where the 1956 film Giant, starring James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson, had been shot. That experience, along with the widespread closings of old-fashioned five-and-dime stores, inspired Graczyk to pen the work that would be his legacy.

The play, he once said, “can only be described as the result of my own observations and frustrations with progress that ignores a past; the lack of personalization and pride and the recurring need of people to build facades to conceal the truths of their lives. It is the facade that makes abnormal people seem normal and the sad people seem happy. A personal observation which I feel makes the people I write about colorful, theatrical, but most of all, honest.”

After his brief stay in Texas, Graczyk moved to Ohio and served as the Artistic Director of the Players Theatre in Columbus where the first version of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean premiered in September 1976. In early 1980, the play was staged in New York City with filmmaker Altman directing in his Broadway debut.

The Broadway production starring Karen Black, Cher, Sandy Dennis and Kathy Bates was not well-received and closed on April 4, 1982, after barely two months. Still, Altman remained an admirer and decided to film the production with the original cast. That same year, the film version won the Gold Hugo for Best Feature at the 18th Chicago Film Festival and Graczyk won the Best Screenplay Award at the Belgium Film Festival the same year.

Cher was nominated for a Golden Globe and a Los Angeles Film Critics award for her performance as Sissy, one of the long-ago five-and-dime employees and James Dean fan club members who return for a reunion. In addition to Sissy, the group’s reunion is attended by, among others, Mona (Dennis), who claims to have a son fathered by Dean and the mysterious Joanne (Black), who has a secret of her own to share.

Graczyk followed up Jimmy Dean with A Murder of Crows, which opened at New York’s South Side Theater in September 1988. In the early 1990s, he wrote a one-man show with Keith Carradine entitled My Time Ain’t Long. By 2003, Graczyk was living in Ohio’s Miami Valley area and was still writing plays, although in his words, “There are currently several scripts running around in my computer looking for an exit.”

His most recent play, The Blue Moon Dancing, premiered in Dallas in August 2010. Throughout his career, Graczyk also served as a theater designer and administrator. He worked with various institutions including Hartford Stage Company and Erie Playhouse.

A musical based on Jimmy Dean had its world premiere in June 2025 at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley.

Graczyk is survived by his partner of more than years, Jeffrey Billiel; and his sister, Shirley.