Waiting to Get Whitey

The defect of the slice-of-life play is that it is never a loaf. The defect of the realistic play is that it trusts the naked eye and ignores the mind's eye. In its endless scanning of surfaces and appearances, slice-of-life realism scants the substance of truth and reality. It is a pity that Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, by Lonne Elder III, occupies the worst of these two decidedly dated dramatic worlds.

The play also confirms a kind of habit of Manhattan's Negro Ensemble Company: that of doing spindly works with skill, verve, and beautifully meshed precision. Ceremonies is a play about mastering fate by ambushing it. In the social protest of the '30s, the dramatic rallying cry was Waiting for Lefty. Written in the era of the Negro revolution, Elder's play might be subtitled Waiting to Get Whitey. At the same time, it is the story of the disintegration of a black family. The father (Douglas Turner), an ex-vaudeville hoofer of 54, is a widower who runs a singularly unsuccessful barbershop. He has two sons, both of whom believe that working for a living is an indignity if it means working for a white man. One of them is an adept shoplifter. A daughter tries to stand for a traditional moral order that seems to be as dead as the mourned mother.

Bewildered by his failure to make an honest living, the father is ready prey to a black militant's suggestion that the barbershop be used as an illicit corn-liquor supply depot. Apart from the father's fling with a floozy, only one thing happens, and that is melodramatic. The shoplifting son is killed, which comes very close to echoing the old-fashioned moral that the wages of sin is death.

Along the meandering way, there are flurries of humor, menace, and a sense of the claustrophobic inertia of Harlem life. But what really makes the play bearable is the superior performances of the players, most notably the emotionally explosive acting of Douglas Turner. He, in particular, gives the drama the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation it so desperately needs.

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