Norm Lewis Photo by Maria Baranova

The notion that an oppressed people breaking the law can be justified when confronted by a system that intrinsically holds them down wasn't new in 1969, when the now venerated Negro Ensemble Company premiered Elder's eventual Pulitzer Prize runner-up at St. Mark's Playhouse, and it still oftentimes reaches the forefront of the national discussion.

While Elder's play doesn't exactly defend criminal activity as a defense against racial oppression, the author does allow those who believe such substantial time at the podium. As theatre at its most meaningful often does, this intimate story can give a 65-year-old white playgoer like myself a look into the issues that gets more personal than news reports and late-night monologues.

Director Clinton Turner Davis' handsome mounting, a co-production of The Negro Ensemble Company and another long-admired Off-Broadway troupe, The Peccadillo Theater Company, embraces the museum-like quality of this somewhat forgotten classic, with a very strong ensemble led by Norm Lewis, a New York stage veteran primarily known for his superb performances in musical theatre. Given a rare opportunity to be the centerpiece of a straight drama, he gives an exceptionally engaging performance that bottles up his character's longings for dreams deferred until the final emotional scene.

Set in the 1950s, this is one of those plays so steeped in the contemporary issues of its time that details that would have been understood by its original audiences without overstatement may be lost on 21st century playgoers without a bit of research. With the GI Bill facilitating a white flight into the suburbs that gutted Manhattan of its middle-class job opportunities, the controversial Urban Renewal program (which James Baldwin deemed as "Negro Removal") promised to revitalize underserved Black communities with homogenized rebuilding of neighborhoods that replaced decades of local character with an influx of white-owned businesses.

Designer Harry Feiner's unit set shows the skeletal structure of Russell Parker's (Lewis) failing barber shop on the 126th street level of the building where he lives with his daughter and two sons. Upstage we can see the buildings that once graced the Harlem Renaissance witnessing the neighborhood's decline.

Between rare visits from customers, Russell, a former vaudeville dancer whose aging body gave out on him (Lewis' stage charm and musical theatre presence is channeled believably into his character), spends most of his time playing checkers and exchanging wisecracks with his friend William Jenkins (soft-spoken James Foster, Jr.). This is the ceremonial practice the two men have aged into; a way of avoiding the humiliation of institutionalized racism they've endured all their lives.

When Russell says, "I can't work. I don't know how to," it comes from the lifetime experience of being denied opportunity. (One could assume that his vaudeville gigs came via the low-paying Theatre Owners Booking Association, the early 20th century's primary employer of Black stage talent.)

Russell's two sons also seem to have given up in the search for a steady income. Older brother Theo (brash and energetic Bryce Michael Wood) has bounced unsuccessfully from job to job and now fancies himself as an artist. His younger brother Bobby (introverted Jeremiah Packer) is an artist of another kind, especially adept at shoplifting. Theo convinces him to steal a typewriter as a birthday present for their father so that he can type up his handwritten memoirs into a book that will surely bring some money in.

Their sister Adele (crisp and no-nonsense Morgan Siobhan Green) keeps the family financially afloat after quitting college and getting a downtown office job, but having seen her mother work herself to an early death to support the family, she's determined not to do the same and has given the men a six-day deadline for one of them to get a job or else she's changing the locks on the building.

Theo's last-minute solution to their financial woes is to bottle and sell the family recipe for corn liquor, which he calls Black Lighting. (A twist on the traditional White Lightning nickname for moonshine.) Soon, he's introducing his father and brother to a well-dressed gentleman named Blue Haven (quietly imposing Calvin H. Thompson), a higher-up with The Harlem De-Colonization Association, an organization dedicated to use any means, legal or not, to economically drive Mr. You Know Who (his euphemism for the white man) out of Harlem.

If Russell is agreeable, Blue will turn his barber shop into a cover for a 24-hour headquarter for selling bootleg hooch, running numbers, and selling dart boards with white man targets. It's a dangerous proposition for sure, but Russell is tempted by the chance to finally be a success in life and maybe earn enough money to convince another woman to marry him. (Felicia Boswell has a short, but memorable appearance as a potential fling who's more savvy than she lets on.)

The year that Ceremonies In Dark Old Men opened also saw the premiere, in a television presentation, of Alice Childress' Wine In The Wilderness, which was revived earlier this season in an exceptional Off-Broadway production. In that play, the young Black man who is the central character learns to recognize an elderly, underemployed, frequently inebriated Black man as "the guy who was here before there were scholarships and grants and stuff like that, the guy they kept outta the schools, the man the factories wouldn't hire, the union wouldn't let him join."

Elder's play expands on this recognition and gives a serious voice to a soul who spent his life only being recognized when he entertained.