“When you have Tony Kushner standing in you’re living room you are like - what did I do to deserve this?”

“Talisman Roses, the Festival’s 12th world premiere of a Tennessee Williams play, will be directed by Marsha Mason, who is herself from St. Louis and has been nominated four times for an Oscar. It will be performed alongside several other world premiere short plays on the theme of waiting by Charlene A. Donaghy (Gift of an Orange, 2012), and Festival newcomer Joseph Paprzycki.”

“If you are at all taken by the story of Joe Paprzycki’s dream, I suggest you buy a ticket, or a season pass, and go see the Jasper Street miracle. ”

“People have come from South Carolina and the Main Line (in suburban Philadelphia) and many other places to see the plays, so they aren’t afraid of the neighborhood,” he says. “I think we could be like Provincetown on Cape Cod, a place for neighborhood theater that people wouldn’t expect. Camden isn’t just squalor. It is a place where people can still dream.”

“It’s like a fresh breeze is blowing around here,’’ says Paprzycki. “It may have been long in coming, but you can almost feel the hope in the air. So yes, there’s a lot to celebrate, and some very good vibes in the Camden air”

“Joe Paprzycki, the artistic director of the South Camden Theatre Company in New Jersey, also comes to the Tennessee Williams Festival in Provincetown every year. His productions of Williams’s plays Suddenly Last Summer and The Night of the Iguana have brought his company great reviews. A production of Kingdom of Earth, directed by Connie Norwood, opens the 2013 season in Camden, starting October 11.”

“When one is passionate about something like theatre and attends productions frequently, one is always on the look-out for the unusual or unique performance. It piques curiosity and keeps interest fresh. This reviewer received such an opportunity when South Camden Theatre Company (SCTC) and Joseph M. Paprzycki presented EXORCISM written in 1919 by master American playwright, Eugene G. O’Neill. ”

“Joseph Paprzycki isn’t a playwright given to happy endings when he stages his productions at his Waterfront South Theatre.There’s just too much sorrow in Camden. That’s why his hand tends to write gritty stories. Unapologetic stories.
Whether it’s “Last Rites,” his mournful ode to his late grandfather’s taproom at 4th and Jasper, and how it got swept into the vortex that sucked the life out of Camden when the New York Shipbuilding Co. shut down in 1967, or “Indoor Picnic,” a study of urban decay and a Polish-American men’s club adrift in an ethnically changing neighborhood, Paprzycki thinks...”

“The tough language and even tougher subject matter of Indoor Picnic,on stage through Sunday at the South Camden Theatre Company, hit close to home for many audience members. ”

“Blaring polka music from the open window; lights shining down on the people ready to dance in the street outside the theatre; extended laughing and camaraderie: South Camden Theatre Company (SCTC) uses many aspects of the neighborhood to spotlight its good works. SCTC is at it again with INDOOR PICNIC. Author Joseph M. Paprzycki used others’ memories and stories, iconic references, and his own fertile imagination to write an original play about Camdem in the 1960s through 1980s—a time that was comfortable and accommodating but when racial bigotry hung over the hardworking men of the time. ”

“Miraculously we now have a beatuiful theatre and it’s the first live theatre build in Camden in 100 years.”

“South Camden Theatre Company opens its eighth season Oct. 26 with “Indoor Picnic,” written by the company’s Producing Artistic Director Joseph M. Paprzycki and directed by Ray Croce.
Performed at the Waterfront South Theatre on Jasper Street, the play is a view of Camden in decay through the eyes of four members of a fading Polish American club.
Set during the 1960s through the 1990s, it tells the story, too, of racism, as experienced by the club’s African American cleaning woman, Flossie.”

“Paprzycki does not write about the genteel southern aristocrat often presented in other works about Williams. Paprzycki give us a totally different view … this is Williams storming against the elements that have kept him from what he considers his deserved happiness.”

“Before we classify Clifford Odets’ 1935 one-act called WAITING FOR LEFTY as a museum piece, a relic from another era almost never performed today, we should listen to what South Camden Theatre Company is telling us – with today’s news in mind. ”

“You don’t have to convince Joe Paprzycki that the more things change the more things stay the same”

“Paprzycki’s WAITING FOR LEFTY was a forceful and emotional set of vignettes of unjust victimization.”

“You come here, sit in a seat in my grandfather’s old bar, when the lights go up its 1967 and you’re in exactly the same spot. This theater was built because of a play.”

“I’ve known (Joe) 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.”

“Joseph Paprzycki, will raise a toast to his Polish grandparents from the lobby of the new 96-seat Waterfront South Theater built on the very site of the bar (they owned).”