Kevin Riordan: Camden's Waterfront South Theatre opens Friday with locally written 'Last Rites'

If I were telling this tale as a joke, I'd say it's the one about a bar, a priest, and the

Last Rites

.

The last is the title of the debut production at the brand-new, 96-seat Waterfront South Theatre. It opens Friday at Fourth and Jasper Streets, a block off Camden's Broadway.

"It's life, it's art - and it's how cities repair themselves," playwright Joseph Paprzycki says, welcoming me into the light-filled lobby of the tasteful, three-story structure.

Outside, workers install railings on the front steps; on stage, designer Robert Bingaman applies finishing touches to the Last Rites set. It evokes the corner bar that stood on the site in 1967, when the nearby New York Shipbuilding Corp. closed.

In the late 1990s, I saw a showcase production of the play - the first of several Paprzycki has written - in New York. Last Rites is a lyrical look at blue-collar urban America, a deeply personal requiem for a lost way of life.

"When the lights come up, you'll be in Walt's Cafe," Paprzycki says. "My grandfather's bar."

A 52-year-old Gloucester City resident, the playwright has fond memories of the corner establishment Walt and Sue Evanuk ran for 30 years.

"I remember drinking orange sodas at the bar," Paprzycki says. "I remember the guys telling stories. And I knew there was a larger story here."

Until the jobs drained away, South Camden and other city neighborhoods were self-contained.

"The neighborhood was where you lived and worked and shopped," Paprzycki says. "It was where you went to school and went to church."

Which brings us to the part about the priest.

Paprzycki is a member of Sacred Heart, where the pastor is Msgr. Michael Doyle, a lover of the written and spoken word.

"I was coming out of church one Sunday," the playwright recalls, "and he says to me, 'Joe, why don't you put on your play right here in the neighborhood?' "

So Paprzycki presented Last Rites in the basement of Sacred Heart, just across the street from the ruins of Walt's Cafe and a few blocks from the remnants of New York Ship.

The productions began in 2003 and became a signature of the South Camden Theatre Company, of which Paprzycki is now the producing artistic director. His work was embraced by local audiences, as well as the Heart of Camden, the respected community-development organization the church established in the 1980s.

Originally focused on renovating houses, Heart of Camden is now leading an effort to create a neighborhood cultural arts district. Paprzycki proposed the new theater, and Heart of Camden's allies and benefactors stepped up - people like Adolfo Piperno, a Moorestown businessman whose Domenica Foundation underwrote $750,000 of the project's construction cost.

"If we'd had to pay everyone who did work on this project the going rate," Paprzycki observes, "this would be a $1 million theater."

The top individual ticket price for each of the coming season's four shows, including Waiting for Lefty and A Moon for the Misbegotten, is $15 - $12, if you buy the package.

"We want to be accessible to the community," Paprzycki notes.

The nonprofit theater will have plenty of rehearsal and classroom space available to rent, in addition to its pleasant auditorium, where Joe and I chat in the front row.

I've known him since the late '90s, when he was first writing plays and telling tales. Many have had a way of coming true.

Like the notion of a new theater in this tough, battered corner of Camden.

"This is how things get started," Paprzycki says. Entrepreneurs "could get these storefronts for next to nothing and open businesses."

Two years ago, when the theater construction began, "people in the neighborhood saw something being built here, not torn down," Paprzycki says. "That's got to create hope. That's got to be something that inspires."

It does.