A Theater on the White Horse Pike Bets, Again, on a Story Nobody’s Told

HADDON TOWNSHIP — There is an easy way to run a local theater, and The Ritz Theatre Company has spent nine years refusing to do it.

The easy way is to pick a title people already love — a Shrek, a Freaky Friday, a jukebox night of somebody else’s hits — and let the marquee do the selling. It works. It fills seats. You can hear it working at playhouses all over South Jersey this very month — a Freaky Friday coming to Pitman, tribute nights by the fistful. What you cannot do with it is surprise anyone.

So this weekend, the folks at 915 White Horse Pike are doing the hard thing instead. On Friday night they raise the curtain on Trolls and Men, a brand-new play by local writer Alex Wilkie — not a revival, not a tribute, not a thing you’ve seen before in a different wig. It is the ninth original work the Ritz has mounted in nine straight years through its New Works Initiative, and if that number doesn’t impress you, spend a few minutes trying to name another neighborhood playhouse in South Jersey that has premiered nine original works in nine years. I’ll wait.

A stage as contraband

The play itself is the kind of swing that tells you what a theater believes about itself. Wilkie, whose writing career runs back more than two decades, sets Trolls and Men in 1940s Norway and builds it around what the company bills as a true story — Julius Thoreson, the artistic director of the Trondheim Transformational Theatre, who turns his little company into a cell of resistance after the Nazis roll into his country. When a newly installed Minister of Culture and Enlightenment comes sniffing around, the stage itself becomes contraband. The theater becomes, as the company puts it, a cultural battleground.

Sit with that choice for a second. A theater company in Camden County has chosen to tell the story of theater people under a regime that wanted the theater silenced. That is not an accident. That is a mission statement with a lighting plot. Director Lori Aleixo-Howard is steering it, and the company describes the result as an inspiring tale about the power of theater and the human spirit — which could be a greeting card if the subject matter weren’t so bracingly unsentimental about what art actually costs when it matters.

New only once

The Ritz keeps a busy October. A night later this month brings an intimate cabaret evening to the same room, because a company this prolific doesn’t take weekends off. But Trolls and Men is the one I’d clear my calendar for, and here’s why: you can see Shrek again next year, and the year after that, and it will be exactly the same ogre. You will not get another chance at the first run of this. The whole point of a theater that makes new things is that the thing is new only once.

The whole point of a theater that makes new things is that the thing is new only once.Jenna Joy

Trolls and Men runs weekends October 9 through 25, with evening and matinee performances, at The Ritz Theatre Company, 915 White Horse Pike, Haddon Township. Tickets are available through the company’s box office online.

Go see the hard thing. It’s the one worth remembering.

Based on reporting from New Jersey Stage, The Ritz Theatre Company, and The Retrospect.