A playwright or dramatist is a person who writes plays , which are a form of drama that primarily consists of dialogue between characters and is intended for theatrical performance rather than just reading . Ben Jonson coined the term "playwright" and is the first person in English literature to refer to playwrights as separate from poets .
57-928: Edward Graczyk (born 1941/1942)is a playwright originally from Ohio . He wrote several children's plays early in his career, but became better known as the author of 1976's Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean . In 1982, Graczyk won the Best Screenplay Award at the Belgium International Film Festival for Robert Altman 's motion picture adaptation . Graczyk was born in Pennsylvania . Between 1968 and 1973, he lived in Midland, Texas and wrote children's plays such as Aesop's Falables and Livin' de Life . He began to develop his stage drama Come Back to
114-482: A murder mystery play which is the longest-running West End show , it has by far the longest run of any play in the world, with its 29,500th performance having taken place as of February 2024. Contemporary playwrights in the United States are affected by recent declines in theatre attendance. No longer the only outlet for serious drama or entertaining comedies, theatrical productions must use ticket sales as
171-510: A one-man show with Keith Carradine entitled My Time Ain't Long . By 2003, he 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 work, The Blue Moon Dancing , premiered in Dallas on August 20, 2010. Throughout his career, Graczyk has also served as
228-484: A combination of words that strictly belong to Korean and words that are loanwords from Chinese. Due to Chinese being pronounced with varying tones and Korean's removal of those tones, and because the modern Korean writing system, Hangeul, has a more finite number of phonemes than, for example, Latin-derived alphabets such as that of English, there are many homonyms with both the same spelling and pronunciation. For example There are heterographs, but far fewer, contrary to
285-580: A different tone can produce an entirely different word altogether. If tones are included, the number of unique syllables in Mandarin increases to at least 1,522. However, even with tones, Mandarin retains a very large amount of homophones. Yì , for example, has at least 125 homophones, and it is the pronunciation used for Chinese characters such as 义, 意, 易, 亿, 议, 一, and 已. There are even place names in China that have identical pronunciations, aside for
342-487: A few are triples like Most are couples like lehren (to teach) – leeren (to empty). Although Spanish has far fewer homophones than English, they are far from being non-existent. Some are homonyms, such as basta , which can either mean 'enough' or 'coarse', and some exist because of homophonous letters. For example, the letters b and v are pronounced exactly alike, so the words basta (coarse) and vasta (vast) are pronounced identically. Other homonyms are spelled
399-512: A form of playwright. Outside of the Western world there is Indian classical drama , with one of the oldest known playwrights being Śudraka , whose attributed plays can be dated to the second century BC. The Nāṭya Shāstra , a text on the performing arts from between 500BC-500AD, categorizes playwrights as being among the members of a theatre company, although playwrights were generally the highest in social status, with some being kings. In
456-607: A larger amount of possible syllables so that words sounded more distinct from each other. Scholars also believe that Old Chinese had no phonemic tones, but tones emerged in Middle Chinese to replace sounds that were lost from Old Chinese. Since words in Old Chinese sounded more distinct from each other at this time, it explains why many words in Classical Chinese consisted of only one syllable. For example,
513-543: A low-budget film adaptation financed by Viacom Enterprises and Mark Goodson Productions . The film won numerous awards at film festivals, including Best Film at Chicago ; Ed Graczyk won for Best Screenplay at the Belgium International event . The playwright 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
570-455: 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, he moved back to Ohio and served as
627-553: A pejorative sense by Ben Jonson to suggest a mere tradesman fashioning works for the theatre. Jonson uses the word in his Epigram 49, which is thought to refer to John Marston or Thomas Dekker : Jonson described himself as a poet, not a playwright, since plays during that time were written in meter and so were regarded as the province of poets. This view was held as late as the early 19th century. The term "playwright" later again lost this negative connotation. The earliest playwrights in Western literature with surviving works are
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#1732787055015684-654: A playwright, winning awards for his play The Phoenix at both the New York International Fringe Festival in 1999 and the Route 66 American Playwriting Competition in 2000. Today, theatre companies have new play development programs meant to develop new American voices in playwriting. Many regional theatres have hired dramaturges and literary managers in an effort to showcase various festivals for new work, or bring in playwrights for residencies. Funding through national organizations, such as
741-449: A second septet). The questionable octet is: Other than the common words raise , rays , and race this octet includes The inclusion of "race" in the octet above is questionable, since its pronunciation differs from the other words on the list (ending with /s/ instead of /z/). If proper names are included, then a possible nonet would be: The Portuguese language has one of the highest numbers of homophones and consequently homographs in
798-525: A source of income, which has caused many of them to reduce the number of new works being produced. For example, Playwrights Horizons produced only six plays in the 2002–03 seasons, compared with thirty-one in 1973–74. Playwrights commonly encounter difficulties in getting their shows produced and often cannot earn a living through their plays alone, leading them to take up other jobs to supplement their incomes. Many playwrights are also film makers . For instance, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock began his career as
855-562: A stricter interpretation of Aristotle, as this long-lost work came to light in the late 15th century. The neoclassical ideal, which was to reach its apogee in France during the 17th century, dwelled upon the unities , of action, place, and time. This meant that the playwright had to construct the play so that its "virtual" time would not exceed 24 hours, that it would be restricted to a single setting, and that there would be no subplots. Other terms, such as verisimilitude and decorum, circumscribed
912-848: A theater designer and administrator. He has worked with various institutions such as the Hartford Stage Company and the Erie Playhouse . Playwright The earliest playwrights in Western literature with surviving works are the Ancient Greeks . William Shakespeare is amongst the most famous playwrights in literature, both in England and across the world. The word "play" is from Middle English pleye , from Old English plæġ, pleġa, plæġa ("play, exercise; sport, game; drama, applause"). The word wright
969-496: A vowel, and a nasal or retroflex consonant in respective order), there are only a little over 400 possible unique syllables that can be produced, compared to over 15,831 in the English language. Chinese has an entire genre of poems taking advantage of the large amount of homophones called one-syllable articles , or poems where every single word in the poem is pronounced as the same syllable if tones are disregarded. An example
1026-417: Is kikō ( hiragana : きこう ), which is the pronunciation of at least 22 words (some quite rare or specialized, others common; all these examples are two-character compounds), including: Even some native Japanese words are homophones. For example, kami ( かみ ) is the pronunciation of the words The former two words are disambiguated from the latter two by pitch accent. The Korean language contains
1083-522: Is Hans Sachs (1494–1576) who wrote 198 dramatic works. In England, The Second Shepherds' Play of the Wakefield Cycle is the best known early farce. However, farce did not appear independently in England until the 16th century with the work of John Heywood (1497–1580). Playwright William Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted. Most playwrights of
1140-407: Is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning or in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example rose (flower) and rose (past tense of "rise"), or spelled differently, as in rain , reign , and rein . The term homophone sometimes applies to units longer or shorter than words, for example a phrase, letter, or groups of letters which are pronounced
1197-438: Is an archaic English term for a craftsperson or builder (as in a wheelwright or cartwright ). The words combine to indicate a person who has "wrought" words, themes, and other elements into a dramatic form—a play. (The homophone with "write" is coincidental.) The first recorded use of the term "playwright" is from 1605, 73 years before the first written record of the term "dramatist". It appears to have been first used in
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#17327870550151254-477: Is mistakenly placed before -ся in the present tense of the third person, while in others, on the contrary, Ь before -ся is missing in the infinitive form. It is estimated that there are approximately 4,500 to 4,800 possible syllables in Vietnamese, depending on the dialect. The exact number is difficult to calculate because there are significant differences in pronunciation among the dialects. For example,
1311-542: Is still useful to playwrights today is the " French scene ", which is a scene in a play where the beginning and end are marked by a change in the makeup of the group of characters onstage rather than by the lights going up or down or the set being changed. Notable playwrights: Greek theater was alive and flourishing on the island of Crete. During the Cretan Renaissance two notable Greek playwrights Georgios Chortatzis and Vitsentzos Kornaros were present in
1368-544: Is the Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den . Like all Chinese languages, Mandarin uses phonemic tones to distinguish homophonic syllables; Mandarin has five tones. A famous example, Although all these words consist of the same string of consonants and vowels, the only way to distinguish each of these words audibly is by listening to which tone the word has, and as shown above, saying a consonant-vowel string using
1425-406: The Ancient Greeks . These early plays were for annual Athenian competitions among play writers held around the 5th century BC. Such notables as Aeschylus , Sophocles , Euripides , and Aristophanes established forms still relied on by their modern counterparts. We have complete texts extant by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides . The origins of Athenian tragedy remain obscure, though by
1482-624: The National Endowment for the Arts and the Theatre Communications Group , encouraged the partnerships of professional theatre companies and emerging playwrights. Playwrights will often have a cold reading of a script in an informal sitdown setting, which allows them to evaluate their own plays and the actors performing them. Cold reading means that the actors haven't rehearsed the work, or may be seeing it for
1539-627: The Russian language is associated in some cases with the phenomenon of devoicing of consonants at the end of words and before another consonant sound, in other cases with the reduction of vowels in an unstressed position. Examples include: поро г — п о ро к — п а рок, лу г — лу к , пло д — пло т , ту ш — ту шь , падё ж — падё шь , ба л — ба лл , ко сн ый — ко стн ый, пр е дать — пр и дать, к о мпания — к а мпания, к о сатка — к а сатка, прив и дение — прив е дение, ко т — ко д , пру т — пру д , т и трация — т е трация, компл и мент — компл е мент. Also,
1596-753: The Standard Mandarin word 狮子( shīzi , meaning "lion") was simply 狮 ( shī ) in Classical Chinese, and the Standard Mandarin word 教育 ( jiàoyù, "education") was simply 教 ( jiào ) in Classical Chinese. Since many Chinese words became homophonic over the centuries, it became difficult to distinguish words when listening to documents written in Classical Chinese being read aloud. One-syllable articles like those mentioned above are evidence for this. For this reason, many one-syllable words from Classical Chinese became two-syllable words, like
1653-658: The 1980s, an attempt was made to promote a distinctive term for same-sounding multiple words or phrases, by referring to them as "oronyms", but the term oronym was already well established in linguistics as an onomastic designation for a class of toponymic features (names of mountains, hills, etc.), the alternative use of the same term was not well accepted in scholarly literature. There are online lists of multinyms. In English, concerning groups of homophones (excluding proper nouns), there are approximately 88 triplets, 24 quadruplets, 2 quintuplets, 1 sextet, 1 septet, and 1 questionable octet (possibly
1710-449: The 4th century BCE, Aristotle wrote his Poetics , in which he analyzed the principle of action or praxis as the basis for tragedy. He then considered elements of drama: plot ( μύθος mythos ), character ( ἔθος ethos ), thought ( dianoia ), diction ( lexis ), music ( melodia ), and spectacle ( opsis ). Since the myths on which Greek tragedy were based were widely known, plot had to do with
1767-543: The 5th century it was institutionalised in competitions ( agon ) held as part of festivities celebrating Dionysos (the god of wine and fertility ). As contestants in the City Dionysia's competition (the most prestigious of the festivals to stage drama), playwrights were required to present a tetralogy of plays (though the individual works were not necessarily connected by story or theme), which usually consisted of three tragedies and one satyr play. For
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1824-499: The Chinese language is that in non-rap songs, tones are disregarded in favor of maintaining melody in the song. While in most cases, the lack of phonemic tones in music does not cause confusion among native speakers, there are instances where puns may arise. Subtitles in Chinese characters are usually displayed on music videos and in songs sung on movies and TV shows to disambiguate the song's lyrics. The presence of homophones in
1881-412: The Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean , after driving to the small town of Marfa and researching the customs of the area. The legend of actor James Dean , and the closure of five-and-dime stores in this place, lent their influences to the play's development. Graczyk went on to say: Jimmy Dean can only be described as the result of my own observations and frustrations with progress that ignores
1938-561: The Middle Ages, the earliest of which is The Play of the Greenwood by Adam de la Halle in 1276. It contains satirical scenes and folk material such as faeries and other supernatural occurrences. Farces also rose dramatically in popularity after the 13th century. The majority of these plays come from France and Germany and are similar in tone and form, emphasizing sex and bodily excretions. The best known playwright of farces
1995-611: The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of the 17th century, classical ideas were in vogue. As a result, critics of the time mostly rated Shakespeare below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson. This period saw the first professional woman playwright, Aphra Behn . As a reaction to the decadence of Charles II era productions, sentimental comedy grew in popularity. Playwrights like Colley Cibber and Richard Steele believed that humans were inherently good but capable of being led astray. The Italian Renaissance brought about
2052-420: The ancient Greeks, playwriting involved poïesis , "the act of making". This is the source of the English word poet . Despite Chinese Theatre having performers dated back to the 6th century BC with You Meng , their perspective of theatre was such that plays had no other role than "performer" or "actor", but given that the performers were also the ones who invented their performances, they could be considered
2109-404: The arrangement and selection of existing material. Character was determined by choice and by action. Tragedy is mimesis —"the imitation of an action that is serious". He developed his notion of hamartia , or tragic flaw, an error in judgment by the main character or protagonist , which provides the basis for the "conflict-driven" play. There were also a number of secular performances staged in
2166-620: The artistic director of the Players Theatre in Columbus, Ohio ; his tenure there lasted from 1973 to 1993. The first version of Jimmy Dean premiered in September 1976 at Players Theatre; in early 1980, it moved to New York City for a brief run before filmmaker Robert Altman acquired the rights. The resulting Broadway version , which premiered in February 1982, was not a critical success. Nonetheless, Altman soon managed to make
2223-426: The difference in tone. For example, there are two neighboring provinces with nearly identical names, Shanxi (山西) and Shaanxi (陕西) Province. The only difference in pronunciation between the two names are the tone in the first syllable (Shanxi is pronounced Shānxī whereas Shaanxi is pronounced Shǎnxī ) . As most languages exclude the tone diacritics when transcribing Chinese place names into their own languages,
2280-435: The distinction (a minimal pair ) are homophonous in the accent with the merger. Some examples from English are: Wordplay is particularly common in English because the multiplicity of linguistic influences offers considerable complication in spelling and meaning and pronunciation compared with other languages. Malapropisms , which often create a similar comic effect, are usually near-homophones. See also Eggcorn . During
2337-536: The first time, and usually, the technical requirements are minimal. The O'Neill Festival offers summer retreats for young playwrights to develop their work with directors and actors. Playwriting collectives like 13P and Orbiter 3 gather members together to produce, rather than develop, new works. The idea of the playwriting collective is in response to plays being stuck in the development process and never advancing to production. Homophone A homophone ( / ˈ h ɒ m ə f oʊ n , ˈ h oʊ m ə -/ )
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2394-505: The graphemes and digraphs "d", "gi", and "r" are all pronounced /z/ in the Hanoi dialect, so the words dao (knife), giao (delivery), and rao (advertise) are all pronounced /zaw˧/. In Saigon dialect, however, the graphemes and digraphs "d", "gi", and "v" are all pronounced /j/, so the words dao (knife), giao (delivery), and vao (enter) are all pronounced /jaw˧/. Pairs of words that are homophones in one dialect may not be homophones in
2451-478: The infinitive and the present (or simple future) tense of the third person of the same verb are often pronounced the same way (in writing they differ in the presence or absence of the letter Ь (soft sign) before the postfix -ся): (надо) решиться — (он) решится, (хочу) строиться — (дом) строится, (металл может) гнуться — (деревья) гнутся, (должен) вернуться — (они) вернутся. This often leads to incorrect spelling of reflexive verbs ending with -ться/-тся: in some cases, Ь
2508-515: The influence of homophones can be seen everywhere, from CCTV evening sketch programmes, folk art performances and popular folk life. In recent years, receiving the influence of Internet pop culture, young people have invented more new and popular homophones. Homophones even play a major role in daily life throughout China, including Spring Festival traditions, which gifts to give (and not give), political criticism, texting, and many other aspects of people's lives. Another complication that arises within
2565-464: The latter of which varies between /ˈɡe:stə/ and /ˈɡɛstə/ and by a pair like Stiel (handle, stalk) – Stil (style), the latter of which varies between /ʃtiːl/ and /stiːl/. Besides websites that offer extensive lists of German homophones, there are others which provide numerous sentences with various types of homophones. In the German language homophones occur in more than 200 instances. Of these,
2622-490: The latter part of the 16th century. The plays of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing , Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , Friedrich Schiller , and other Sturm und Drang playwrights inspired a growing faith in feeling and instinct as guides to moral behavior and were part of the German romanticism movement. Aleksandr Ostrovsky was Russia's first professional playwright). Author and playwright Agatha Christie wrote The Moustrap ,
2679-443: The number of homophones varies accordingly. Regional variation is especially common in words that exhibit the long vowels ä and e . According to the well-known dictionary Duden , these vowels should be distinguished as /ɛ:/ and /e:/, but this is not always the case, so that words like Ähre (ear of corn) and Ehre (honor) may or may not be homophones. Individual variation is shown by a pair like Gäste (guests) – Geste (gesture),
2736-490: The only way to visually distinguish the two names is to write Shaanxi in Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization . Otherwise, nearly all other spellings of placenames in mainland China are spelled using Hanyu Pinyin romanization. Many scholars believe that the Chinese language did not always have such a large number of homophones and that the phonological structure of Chinese syllables was once more complex, which allowed for
2793-623: The other. For example, the words sắc (sharp) and xắc (dice) are both pronounced /săk˧˥/ in Hanoi dialect, but pronounced /ʂăk˧˥/ and /săk˧˥/ in Saigon dialect respectively. Pseudo-homophones are pseudowords that are phonetically identical to a word. For example, groan/grone and crane/crain are pseudo-homophone pairs, whereas plane/plain is a homophone pair since both letter strings are recognised words. Both types of pairs are used in lexical decision tasks to investigate word recognition . Homophones, specifically heterographs, where one spelling
2850-407: The period typically collaborated with others at some point, as critics agree Shakespeare did, mostly early and late in his career. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. In England, after the interregnum , and Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, there was a move toward neoclassical dramaturgy. Between
2907-665: The reader (as in crossword puzzles ) or to suggest multiple meanings. The last usage is common in poetry and creative literature . An example of this is seen in Dylan Thomas 's radio play Under Milk Wood : "The shops in mourning" where mourning can be heard as mourning or morning . Another vivid example is Thomas Hood 's use of birth and berth as well as told and toll'd (tolled) in his poem "Faithless Sally Brown": In some accents , various sounds have merged in that they are no longer distinctive, and thus words that differ only by those sounds in an accent that maintains
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#17327870550152964-555: The same as a counterpart. Any unit with this property is said to be homophonous ( / h ə ˈ m ɒ f ən ə s / ). Homophones that are spelled the same are both homographs and homonyms . For example, the word read , in "He is well read " and in "Yesterday, I read that book". Homophones that are spelled differently are also called heterographs , e.g. to , too , and two . "Homophone" derives from Greek homo- (ὁμο‑), "same", and phōnḗ (φωνή), "voice, utterance". Homophones are often used to create puns and to deceive
3021-882: The same, but mean different things in different genders. For example, the masculine noun el capital means 'capital' as in 'money', but the feminine noun la capital means 'capital city'. There are many homophones in Japanese, due to the use of Sino-Japanese vocabulary , where borrowed words and morphemes from Chinese are widely used in Japanese, but many sound differences, such as the original words' tones , are lost. These are to some extent disambiguated via Japanese pitch accent (i.e. 日本 vs. 二本 , both pronounced nihon , but with different pitches), or from context, but many of these words are primarily or almost exclusively used in writing, where they are easily distinguished as they are written with different kanji ; others are used for puns, which are frequent in Japanese. An extreme example
3078-557: The subject matter significantly. For example, verisimilitude limits of the unities. Decorum fitted proper protocols for behavior and language on stage. In France, contained too many events and actions, thus, violating the 24-hour restriction of the unity of time. Neoclassicism never had as much traction in England, and Shakespeare 's plays are directly opposed to these models, while in Italy, improvised and bawdy commedia dell'arte and opera were more popular forms. One structural unit that
3135-472: The tendency in English. For example, Using hanja ( 한자 ; 漢字 ), which are Chinese characters , such words are written differently. As in other languages, Korean homonyms can be used to make puns. The context in which the word is used indicates which meaning is intended by the speaker or writer. Due to phonological constraints in Mandarin syllables (as Mandarin only allows for an initial consonant,
3192-415: The words mentioned in the previous paragraph. Even with the existence of two- or two-syllable words, however, there are even multisyllabic homophones. And there are also a lot of harmonic words. The cultural phenomenon brought about by such linguistic characteristics is that from ancient times to the present day, people have been keen to play games and jokes with homophonic and harmonic words. In modern life,
3249-665: The world. Homophonic words include: "Jogo" - I throw, "Jogo" - I play, "Jogo" - Match (Sports), and "Jogo" - Game (This last one is controversial, with dialects like Paulistano considering it non-homophonic, while dialects like Caipira consider it only homophonic, noting that these are two Brazilian dialects.) For example, "Cinto" is a homophone for 9 other words, totalizing 10.(Oxford Languages) Although they are homophones, most of them are also homographs. There are many homophones in present-day standard German. As in other languages, however, there exists regional and/or individual variation in certain groups of words or in single words, so that
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