When it premiered Off Broadway in 1969, “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men” won Lonne Elder III a Drama Desk Award for “most promising playwright.” Today, though, it’s seldom staged or acknowledged. Taking place at a Harlem barbershop in the 1950s, it tracks the way a Black family is undone by scheming ambition and complacency.
A new production at Theater at St. Clement’s, starring an excellent Norm Lewis as its flailing patriarch, makes a case not just for its revival but for a re-examination. As with the best of these observant midcentury dramas, “A Raisin in the Sun” and “Death of a Salesman” among them, “Ceremonies” has a bird’s-eye understanding of human behavior, grounded by the specificity of its setting.
An old vaudevillian still grieving his long-dead wife, Russell Parker (Lewis) hangs around the deserted barbershop his daughter, Adele, pays to keep. Not attempting to earn clients, he kills time playing checkers with a friendly neighbor (James Foster Jr.) and spinning tales to his unemployed sons, the would-be hustler Theopolis (Bryce Michael Wood) and the sticky-fingered Bobby (Jeremiah Packer).
But Adele (Morgan Siobhan Green) has had it. She’d cut her dreams of college short to help support the family, and seven years later, none of them have made anything of themselves. In a week’s time, she plans to sell the shop and change the locks on the adjoining house where they all live. (Harry Feiner’s set fills the bones of its skeletal, two-level structure with homey period touches.)
Green fills out her short appearances imperiously. You’re scared she’ll catch the men as they hatch a plan to sell bootleg whiskey out of the shop with help from the shady Blue (Calvin M. Thompson). His phony “Harlem Decolonization Association” is a shameless front for a tentacled racket, which includes looting neighborhood businesses.
Elder’s play brims with poignant gestures at the Parkers’ world, capturing a Harlem in the midst of the promise of civil rights, and of those in its community caught in the crosshairs of honest work and easy exploitation. His characters feel real and their relationships insightful, though under Clinton Turner Davis’s direction, some laugh lines seem purposely underplayed, as if leaning into the play’s comedy would undermine its eventual tragedy. But Elder’s sharp humor still peeks through his clever plotting, especially in the brothers’ banter.
The work is also a portrait of a generational divide, between Russell’s old-fashioned fear of God and his children’s agnostic survivalism. With droopy-eyed weariness, Lewis affectingly registers a loss of faith. He’s resigned to the scheme’s obviously doomed fate, even as he admits flickers of happiness at remembering old dance routines or carrying on a pitiful fling with a younger woman (Felicia Boswell).
Some issues with pacing and characterization prevent this staging from effectively showcasing all that “Ceremonies” has to offer, but both the play and production have an undeniable dramatic and social potency. It’s as essential as any in the oft-revived midcentury American canon.
Ceremonies in Dark Old Men
Through May 18 at Theater at St. Clement’s, Manhattan; thepeccadillo.com. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes.
