Review: Norm Lewis in Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, a Barbershop King Lear

Nothing will come of nothing, King Lear told Cordelia, and that’s true, too, for Russell Parker (Norm Lewis), a Harlem patriarch who’d rather do nothing — just play checkers and chew the fat — than go downtown and search for a job.

In Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, a 1969 Pulitzer finalist by Lonne Elder III now being revived at the Theatre at St. Clement’s, Russell’s enthusiastic inactivity fuels the exasperation of his own Cordelia, his frustrated, hard-working daughter Adele (Morgan Siobhan Green) who threatens to throw him out of his own home if he won’t contribute to the rent. She’s the breadwinner for her father and two equally unemployed brothers who are content to support their dad’s commitment to leisure. “I’ve never been lazy,” the eldest son Theo (Bryce Michael Wood) explains. “I just don’t want to break my back for the man.”

And there’s nothing lazy either about the Peccadillo Theater Company and director Clinton Turner Davis’s gently endearing revival of a tensely unpredictable play that’s never quite secured its spot in the canon. As an actor, Elder appeared in the premiere of A Raisin in the Sun as Bobo, the friend who goes in with Walter on a doomed business scheme. Much of Ceremonies echoes that plotline, as Theo persuades his father to facilitate a bootleg liquor racket led by the notorious Blue (Calvin M. Thompson) and his anti-gentrification organization.

Blue’s absurdist vision of justice — his followers loot white-owned businesses to force them to exceed their insurance coverage and shut down — perches on the edge of satire, and Elder smartly plays his cards close to the chest, concealing whether this play is ultimately comic or tragic until the final minutes.

This is the rare non-singing role for Lewis, and it’s a gregarious but quiet performance — maybe too quiet, given the noisy AC unit at the Theater at St. Clement’s that sometimes overpowers the actors. Russell, a former vaudeville hoofer turned proprietor of a largely vacant barbershop, is paralyzed by guilt that he allowed his wife to work herself to death for him, yet he can’t stop himself from replicating that relationship with Adele. Lewis is a natural charmer, and he’s especially appealing here when Russell reminisces floridly about his marriage, but he never overdemands the audience’s sympathy. Russell’s an older antihero only practicing flashes of conscientiousness for the first time.

Green’s Adele is compellingly stoic in her exasperation, richly detailed beyond what’s on the page: she’s a woman with a repressed twinkle in her eye who’d be having a lot more fun if she hadn’t dedicated herself to supporting her family. And though Elder sidelines Adele for too much of the action, he also writes the role with a palpable sense of respect. “Who the hell told every Black woman she was a goddamn savior?” Adele explodes late in the play as she recognizes how much of her adulthood she’s spent emulating her mother’s self-sacrifice.

Haircuts are few and far between in Russell’s barbershop (“You don’t stay here long enough to cut Yul Brynner’s hair,” Theo bemoans once his father starts gallivanting around town), but this play could use a trim, too. Each of Elder’s scenes is a little bit too long and ragged around the edges. But this production of Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, staged with a light touch and nimble momentum by Davis, makes a strong case for the play’s staying power.

Elder challenges audiences to consider what it means to live on that thin line between survival and resistance, between being a crook and being a hero. “I want to stop wondering whether I live naked in the cold,” Russell says, evoking Lear on the heath again, as he talks himself into housing an illegal business in his barbershop. In the destructive, desolating face of gentrification, the play ponders, is a man who fights back by any means necessary more sinned against than sinning?