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New theater rises in Camden

A theater grows in Camden. Its foundation is finished, and workers have installed the concrete that marks its auditorium, cafe, and loading area. Its girders are up. It sits in the Waterfront South District, across from Camden's best-known church, and, on another side, a long block of once-abandoned houses now filled with new residents.

David Ehrenkrantz (left) and Patrick Castañeda in the South Camden Theatre Company production of "Mass Appeal."
David Ehrenkrantz (left) and Patrick Castañeda in the South Camden Theatre Company production of "Mass Appeal."Read moreHOWARD SHAPIRO / Staff

A theater grows in Camden.

Its foundation is finished, and workers have installed the concrete that marks its auditorium, cafe, and loading area. Its girders are up. It sits in the Waterfront South District, across from Camden's best-known church, and, on another side, a long block of once-abandoned houses now filled with new residents.

If all goes according to plan, the 98-seat Waterfront South Theatre, at Fourth and Jasper Streets, will open in October for a new season of shows produced by its resident South Camden Theatre Company, which has been producing plays on the basement stage of neighboring Sacred Heart Church.

Five years ago, the theater company was only an after-Mass suggestion by Msgr. Michael Doyle, the civic-activist pastor of Sacred Heart, a church committed to working for social justice.

The way Joe Paprzycki, producing artistic director of the theater company and author of 46 plays and screenplays, tells it: "I came out of church one Sunday and Father Doyle said, 'With all the plays you've written, why don't you ever do any in Camden?' I said, 'Where?' He said, 'Here.' "

The way Doyle, in his melodic Irish lilt, tells it: "I did indeed encourage the birth of the theater, but I don't take the credit. My own claim to fame is I notice miracles. I don't make them happen. They just happen. And I do a good job of noticing miracles happening all around me.

"Now," says the priest, a longtime theatergoer, "it's an incredible thing that the steel is up for the only live theater in the whole city. I'm so delighted that's happening. I know that in some wonderful way, art will help save Camden, because it's inspiration, and we need inspiration here."

"Art will save us!" has become the project's catchphrase, and South Camden Theatre's own slogan, "Anchoring a neighborhood rebirth," says a lot about what's expected of urban artistic ventures these days.

Doyle's vision - art that inspires and energizes - is the essence of art to an artist. But art that energizes a neighborhood by helping to bring crowds, restaurants, shops, and even housing is meaningful to city leaders - and not just in Camden, one of the country's poorest cities. Gov. Rendell plumbed that theory by establishing the Avenue of the Arts when he was Philadelphia mayor, and the Bristol Riverside Theatre and Media Theatre are other regional examples of how theater and other arts can help recharge a community's batteries.

The Bristol and Media theater organizations by now are established and professional; the South Camden company is still an infant, paying its players wages more like honorariums than standard salaries set by Actors Equity, the national union. But it has ardent supporters and is positioned for growth, especially once it has a theater of its own.

"We are trying to revitalize into a niche arts neighborhood," said Helene Pierson, executive director of Heart of Camden, a community group that began at Sacred Heart, has become the Waterfront South's community development corporation, and has revamped almost 200 South Camden homes in the last quarter-century.

The theater's $500,000-plus construction is funded by Cherry Hill businessman Pepe Piperno's nonprofit Domenica Foundation. Architects donated the design, the Ritz Theatre in Oaklyn contributed theater seats it was replacing, and South Jersey builders unions are donating their time and some materials.

Heart of Camden oversees the project and will turn the deed over to the South Camden Theatre Company for $1.

The first play the theater company produced, in 2004, was the first play Paprzycki ever wrote. Called Last Rites, it is set in Walt's Cafe - the Camden bar his grandparents owned and operated - in 1967, the year the New York Shipbuilding Corp. left the city, accelerating Camden's decline.

In the fall, Last Rites will open the new theater, which is being built on the site of Walt's Cafe and two abandoned houses next to it that the local family-run Scanlan Foundation acquired. The theater's intermission cafe will re-create a part of the old bar.

For Paprzycki (pronounced pap-ZIK-ee), 51, watching the theater rise on a site with such meaning for him "is like ghosts in history, pouring out." The theater, with a sunken stage fronting a house that slopes upward, will provide office space for the company, costume and prop storage areas, and a third-floor rehearsal space available for rentals. (It was to have had a basement, too, but Paprzycki says that when digging began, catfish appeared, indicating that further excavation was ill-advised.)

In June, Martin Sheen and his wife, Janet, were in Philadelphia, and they stopped in Camden for a few hours to see Doyle, who was marking his 40th anniversary at Sacred Heart. (He was dispatched to Camden in 1968 for protesting the Vietnam War and subsequently was one of the Camden 28, who were tried and acquitted on charges of raiding a local draft board). Sheen's pastor at Our Lady of Malibu had given him a copy of a collection of Doyle's letters and poems, It's a Terrible Day . . . Thanks Be to God, and Sheen wanted to pay him a visit.

Doyle moved a lectern into the hole in the ground that would become the theater and there, amid the weeds, Sheen launched from memory into a recital of poetry by Rabindranath Tagore, the late Nobel laureate from Calcutta. "Martin Sheen, you are the first famous actor to perform at our theater in Camden," Doyle told him.

The theater company is basking in another sort of artistic blessing: It is presenting Bill C. Davis' Mass Appeal, an often-amusing play about an older priest and a young seminarian who tussle over the role of the church and its clergy. (Produced on Broadway in 1981, it later became a film starring Jack Lemmon.)

When Davis, who lives in Connecticut, learned that South Camden Theatre had obtained rights to produce Mass Appeal, he e-mailed Paprzycki and asked if the theater would like to be the first to do an updated version. On Feb. 6, the theater opened Davis' slightly revised Mass Appeal, which will run through Sunday.

Davis was there opening night, as was Doyle; the two men - who had long admired each other's work but had never met - chatted before the show.

Then the priest who spots miracles took a seat in the front row, in the basement of his church, and watched as actors David Ehrenkrantz and Patrick Castañeda sparred over the play's central question: What does it mean to be a priest?