Last Rites by Joe Paprzycki Releases October 2009

It was only a few weeks ago that I was taking photographs from Joe Paprzycki’s open Jeep as  he drove me around the south Camden waterfront where his play LAST RITES takes place. We stopped to have lunch at a corner bar, probably not very unlike Walt’s Cafe in LAST RITES. We discussed the final edits to his manuscript, the art work for the cover of LAST RITES, and  the progress being made on the construction of his new theater being built right on the site of his grandparent’s bar where LAST RITES takes place.

Hansen Publishing Group decided to publish LAST RITES after meeting Joe at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival last September. The story about his grandparent’s bar and its resurrection as a theatre  struck a chord with us. We were a perfect match: Joe’s a Jersey playwright, we’re a Jersey publisher,  and LAST RITES takes place in Camden, New Jersey. This was meant to be!

The play takes place in Camden, New Jersey in 1967 as a large shipyard is rumored to close. This was a major shipyard; it employed thousands during World War II, and a neighborhood was built up around it.

LAST RITES is a play about misplaced faith. It’s about the shipyard workers, their wives and their parish priests as they struggle with their faith in the American economic system, in their city and in themselves. The uncertainties that the characters in LAST RITES face remind me of the same uncertainties that Americans face today, and this makes the play even more poignant now.