Last Rites

Last Rites is a play about misplaced faith. It unfolds in Camden, New Jersey in 1967 as this blue-collar city experiences the closing of a major shipyard. If the shipyard is the heart of south Camden, then the soul of this working-class neighborhood is Walt's Caf?, a mom and pop corner bar. Here you meet the owners, Walt and Sue Evanuk, whose lives revolve around the rhythms of lunch whistles and shipyard work shifts as they serve up beers and sandwiches to steamfitters, welders and shipbuilders. It is here where new rumors about the shipyard's closing are discussed and discounted. You bear witness to the lives of the ship workers, their wives, and the parish priests as they pass through the doors of Walt and Sue's bar and give their testament to the stress and strain that economic and social change has brought to their lives and to their beloved city.

Joseph M. Paprzycki is an author of forty-seven plays and screenplays including Last Rites, Tennessee’s Final Curtain, Understudies, Fortune Cookies and Youth in America. He was born and raised in Camden, NJ where four of his plays and one screenplay are set. Last Rites is set in his grandparents’ bar and neighborhood where he spent weekends as a boy. Over twenty-five of Joseph M. Paprzycki plays have been produced in New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia area. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Rosemont College, La Salle University and Temple University where he has taught either playwriting or scriptwriting on both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He is also the Producing Artistic Director of the South Camden Theatre Company.