Ceremonies in Dark Old Men by Lonne Elder

First produced: 1965, at Wagner College, Staten Island, New York; 1969, in revised form, at St. Mark’s Playhouse, New York, New York

First published: 1969

Type of work: Play

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: Early spring of an unspecified year, probably in the 1960’s

Locale: 126th Street, Harlem, New York

Principal Characters:

• Russell B. Parker, a widower who runs a barbershop that has no customers; he lives upstairs with his daughter and two sons
• William Jenkins, Parker’s friend and checkers opponent
• Theopolis “Theo” Parker, Russell’s older son, who teams up with Blue Haven to set up a bootlegging business
• Bobby Parker, Russell’s younger son, an expert burglar and shoplifter
• Adele Eloise Parker, Russell’s hard-working daughter, who supports the entire family with her office job
• Blue Haven, a tough man of the streets who knows how to exploit weaker men

The Play

Ceremonies in Dark Old Menis set in Harlem, in a run-down barbershop on 126th Street. The play is divided into two acts of about equal length. The staging is very simple and naturalistic. The barbershop owned by Russell Parker is dominated by a barber’s throne, which Parker appropriates whenever he is in the room. Elsewhere around the shop are a wall mirror, several projecting shelves, a clothes rack, a card table, and six chairs. Off to the right is a back room with an old refrigerator, a desk, and a bed. A short flight of stairs on the far right leads up to living quarters, and a door signals a set of stairs coming up from a small basement. There are no symbolic or expressionistic effects and no dramatic physical activity, except the checkers games that Parker and Jenkins play and a mildly suggestive sexual scene between Parker and his girlfriend. The language is frequently obscene.

The play opens with Jenkins entering for a game of checkers with Parker, a ritual that they engage in frequently. Parker has yet to win a game. Their dialogue is easy and natural, the companionable chatting of two men who are perfectly at ease with themselves and with each other in the barbershop setting. A comic note is struck when Parker sees his daughter, Adele, coming home from work. He makes Jenkins hide under the bed in the back room. This subterfuge is necessary because Adele is constantly after Parker and his two sons to stir themselves and find jobs. Parker knows that if he is caught playing checkers, he will get a scolding.

Since the death of Parker’s wife, Doris, Adele has been the breadwinner, supporting her idle father and the two layabout boys, Theo and Bobby. Supporting three able-bodied men—assuming her mother’s role—has begun to grate on Adele’s nerves. At one point she angrily bursts out, “But then I found myself doing the same things she had done, taking care of three men, trying to shield them from the danger beyond that door, but who the hell ever told every black woman she was some kind of goddamn savior!”

Adele walks in and immediately begins grilling Parker about his attempts to find a job that morning, attempts that he has not made. While they bicker, Theo and Bobby come in. Adele promptly begins to taunt them about their idleness. Finally, Adele tells the three of them that they have six days to find work. If they have not, she is going to change the locks on the door so that they can enter only with her permission. Adele is adamant about her proposed new rule: “I am not going to let the three of you drive me into the grave the way you did Mama.”

After a heated confrontation with the three men, Adele storms upstairs. As soon as she leaves, Jenkins comes out from under the bed. Parker had completely forgotten him, and Jenkins is angry. Not knowing that he was in the room, Adele had snapped to Parker that “most of your time is spent playing checkers with that damn Mr. Jenkins.” The man’s feelings are hurt enough that he will not stay for any more checkers games. Jenkins comes across as a decent enough man, and Adele’s contempt for him appears to be based on nothing more substantial than the opportunity for wasting time that he offers to Parker. That is certainly a minor fault, since Parker would not be doing anything but loafing in his shop anyway.

Theo has never displayed any perseverance. His father grumbles at him for having gone from one thing to another, most recently an effort at becoming a painter, an effort that has produced only “two ghastly, inept paintings.” After Jenkins leaves, Theo introduces a new project to his father. Theo brings Parker a brown paper bag containing a bottle of corn whiskey, from which Parker takes several large, approving swigs. Thus is born the Parker family’s latest money-making scheme.

To overcome his father’s doubts about his plan to make corn whiskey, Theo gets his father drunk and urges him to reminisce about courting his wife and doing dance routines. The first scene ends with Adele coming in to announce supper in the middle of Parker’s execution of some fancy dance steps.

Scene 2, set six days later—the deadline for the men to find jobs—opens with Theo telling Bobby to steal a typewriter, the kind of assignment at which Bobby has a reputation for excelling. Theo treats Bobby as not quite an equal, not even as a younger brother, but as a slow younger brother. Bobby sulks about this but does Theo’s bidding. Theo wants the typewriter to encourage Parker to write his memoirs. Parker comes in at this point, claiming to be worn out from job hunting. He goes upstairs to placate Adele.

Blue Haven’s entrance is dramatic. He is dressed entirely in blue and wears sunglasses. He carries a gold-topped cane and a large salesman’s sample case. Blue is something of the Fagin of Harlem, the boss of a “piano brigade,” a gang of thieves and store burglars. Blue identifies himself as the “Prime Minister of the Harlem De-Colonization Association,” a fantasy of his devoted to the disestablishment of “Mr. You-Know-Who.”

Blue’s plan for Parker and his sons is that they run, out of their basement, a bootlegging operation featuring Theo’s corn whiskey. He also envisions various entrepreneurial diversifications such as numbers games and dartboards embellished with some of the most hated white faces. The corn whiskey is named “Black Lightning.”

Blue is a figure of deliberate but almost comic menace who provokes Parker’s question, “What kind of boy are you that you went through so much pain to dream up this cockeyed, ridiculous plan of yours?” Blue’s answer is moving, and it makes clear that behind the Amos-’n’-Andy antics of Parker and Jenkins there is a real issue in a real world of suffering and degradation. Blue explains that he was born nearby and that before he was ten years old he felt that he had been living for a hundred years. He says, “I got so old and tired I didn’t know how to cry.” He is now making money, so he does not “have to worry about some bastard landlord or those credit crooks on 125th Street.”

Blue’s hunger for justice and some room in the world for himself comes through poignantly. Parker, heretofore skeptical, is won over to the grand project to market Black Lightning. Act 1 ends with a dramatic shouting match in which Adele’s strong protests against Theo’s bootlegging project are overridden by Parker, who asserts his patriarchal role by approving the illegal scheme.

Act 2, set two months later, plays out the bootlegging story. The enterprise has been a great success. Theo works hard over the brewing process in the basement, succeeding for the first time in his life. Bobby is apparently deeply involved in Blue Haven’s burglary undertakings, and several nearby stores have closed their doors because of losses from theft. Parker, who has brought Jenkins in for a slice of the investment, is busy with new clothes, a young girlfriend, and a losing struggle to recapture his salad days. Adele has a boyfriend who demands much of her time.

Things unravel. The barbershop is getting a bad reputation because the whole neighborhood knows what is going on there. Jenkins bursts in to collect his profits and declares that he no longer wants to be part of the enterprise. Theo becomes disgruntled over what he thinks is a lack of help with the production process. When Parker brings his girlfriend home, she turns out to be a spy for one of Blue’s enemies. She is interested only in what she can learn from Parker about what they are doing and where the pilfered loot is being kept. His avowals of love and proposals of marriage are embarrassing in the light of her frank contempt for him. Adele comes home. She has been beaten by her lover, who discovered her with one of his friends. Finally, with everyone disillusioned in their bright hopes for new lives with Black Lightning, the fatal blow comes in the form of news that Bobby has been shot to death by a security guard.

Critical Context

Lonne Elder III was born in Americus, Georgia, in 1931. His family soon moved to New Jersey, where he grew up. In the mid-l950’s, Elder joined the Harlem Writers Guild. He identifies Douglas Turner Ward of that group as a major influence on his career as a playwright.

Ceremonies in Dark Old Men was first performed at Wagner College on Staten Island in 1965. A Stanley Drama Award and a John Hay Whitney Fellowship enabled Elder to study filmmaking at the Yale School of Drama from 1965 to 1967. Other fellowships followed. The revised version of Ceremonies in Dark Old Men was first performed professionally in 1969, by the Negro Ensemble Company.

Although there were dissenting voices, most critics gave high praise to Ceremonies in Dark Old Men. The play was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, and it won the Outer Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Vernon Rice Award, the Stella Holt Memorial Playwrights Award, and the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award.

Most viewers thought that Elder avoided the stereotypes and preoccupations present in the works of other African American dramatists of the 1960’s. The play does not focus, for example, on black-white confrontations and the social evils of racism. Clearly, all of the Parker family members have been scarred deeply by these evils, but family relationships and universal human aspirations make the Parkers something much more than victims of injustice and make the play something much more than a tract against oppression.

Bibliography

Cherry, Wilsonia E. D. “Lonne Elder III.” In Afro-American Writers After 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers, edited by Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris. Vol. 38 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 1985. One of the longest sketches of Elder’s life and his career as a dramatist. The commentary on Ceremonies in Dark Old Men stresses the play’s depiction of the resilience of the American black family.

Fontenot, Chester. “Mythic Patterns in River Niger and Ceremonies in Dark Old Men.” MELUS 7 (Spring, 1980): 41-49. An excellent piece of formal analysis that does much to reveal the structure of the play.

Gant, Liz. “An Interview with Lon Elder.” Black World 22 (April, 1973): 38-48. One of the most extensive of the interviews Elder has given. Very informative.

Hill, Errol G., and James V. Hatch. A History of African American Theatre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Comprehensive overview of African American dramatic production; places Elder both within the context of the 1960’s and within the broader context of American and African American theater as a whole.

Jeffers, Lance. “Bullins, Baraka, and Elder: The Dawn of Grandeur in Black Drama.” CLA Journal 16 (September, 1972): 32-48. Fine appreciation of three African American writers who rose to prominence in the 1960’s.

King, Woodie, Jr. The Impact of Race: Theatre and Culture. New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2003. Takes a cultural-studies approach to African American theater studies, tracing the functioning of race within African American drama and the function of that drama within American and global culture.

Turner, Darwin T. “Lonne Elder III.” In Contemporary Dramatists, edited by James Vinson. 2d ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977. This early recognition of Elder contains one of the most sensitive readings of Ceremonies in Dark Old Men.