Rediscovering a Black Masterpiece

The most acclaimed play of this Broadway season – winner of the Tony award for best play, as well as the Pulitzer Prize – was Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Purpose. I found the drama, about tensions in the family of a revered Civil Rights leader, workmanlike but unsatisfying —  packed with cumbersome back-story (much of it simply narrated to the audience by one of the two sons) and plot contrivances (a brother just freed from a prison term for political corruption; his resentful wife, who may be planning either suicide or murder; a girlfriend who crashes the family dinner and, predictably, sets off a crisis; a load of bees in the basement) that feel imposed by a playwright rather than lived in. Jacobs-Jenkins, it seems to me, writes roles rather than characters. And sure enough, five of the play’s actors were nominated for Tonys. (One of them, Kara Young, won.)   

This was the context in which I — a white critic with reservations about perhaps the hottest Black playwright of the moment — went to see another acclaimed Black play of a half-century ago: Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, by Lonne Elder III, currently in the midst of a well-received off-Broadway revival at the Theater at St. Clement’s.

Like Purpose, Elder’s play, first staged in 1969, is a family drama, but far more grounded and believable. Russell Parker (Norm Lewis) is the fiftyish proprietor of a Harlem barber shop that seems to have no customers. He either can’t or won’t look for other work, and neither of his two sons has a job. Only the women in this family seem capable of making their way in the world: one dead (Russell’s late, hard-working wife), the other very much alive and angry, their daughter, whose office job is apparently supporting all of them.  

This hint of the old racial stereotype about shiftless males being dominated by strong women may be one reason this excellent play is revived so seldom. But Ceremonies in Dark Old Men is much subtler than that. The play is solidly planted in a specific time, place, and political context — Harlem in the early years of the Civil Rights movement — and the family’s plight is a reflection of both their personal flaws and the unforgiving realities of the environment in which they are trapped.

Russell’s two sons, looking for a moneymaking scheme, convince their dad to turn over the barber shop to a slick local businessman, who dismisses political activism in favor of a shady business operation (bootleg whisky and illegal gambling), with the rather dubious aim of driving all the white businesses out of Harlem. Russell’s initial resistance, then final acquiescence, is entirely plausible, a reflection both of his own weaknesses, and the grim reality of a community where the only way out — the play seems to say, without actually saying it — is crime.  

Elder — part of a talented generation of Black playwrights in the 1960s that included Ed Bullins, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), and Adrienne Kennedy — has a sure sense of pacing, the play’s four-act structure as tight, tense, and inevitable as Ibsen.  There’s not a false step, overdone  moment, or unneeded diversion. Even the checker games between Russell and his irascible best friend Jenkins, which initially seem to be mere scene-setting, become integral to the play’s themes (as well as the source of its title). 

Lewis, a well-traveled Broadway actor and singer (Porgy, in the 2012 Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess) is stunningly good as the Parker patriarch: a spent, disillusioned man, who still radiates a life force (trying to reproduce, on his crippled old feet, a soft-shoe number from his days as a carnival entertainer), even as the misguided business scheme exposes his recklessness and greed. 

The entire cast and production, directed by Clinton Turner Davis, are superb, building the tension inexorably, to the tragic denouement and devastating last line. James Baldwin called Ceremonies in Dark Old Men “the most truthful play I have seen in a long time.” More than 50 years later, its milieu and themes may be dated, but its truth isn’t. My only question: Why isn’t this play on Broadway?