for work and spends time playing checkers with
his retired friend, William Jenkins, whom he has
never beaten in their weekly marathons. Theo, the
oldest son, engages in a get-rich-quick bootlegging
and numbers running scheme with streetwise Blue
Haven, “Prime Minister of the Harlem Decoloni-
zation Association, while Bobby, the youngest sib-
ling, further hones his skills and reputation as a
professional shoplifter and thief.
By the end of the play, the family is totally frag-
mented. Although Theo and Parker experience a
modicum of success with their Black Lightening
bootlegging business, their expected rewards are
not readily forthcoming; Theo ends up working
harder than ever before, and Parker is deceived by
a young lover who spies for their competitor. Adele
finds herself in an abusive relationship, and Bobby,
whose shoplifting talents are totally exploited by
Blue, is shot and killed by security guards. Ironi-
cally, on the day Bobby is killed, his father finally
beats his best friend at chess.
Although Elder explores the inevitable con-
sequences of a depraved urban life, specifically
through Blue, Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, un-
like the mid-century paradigmatic play A Raisin
in the Sun or the militant agitprop drama popu-
larized by AMIRI BARAKA and ED BULLINS during
the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, is not fundamentally
about American racism or oppression in the post–
civil rights era. Elder turns his camera inward to
examine issues that threaten the existence and
strength of the black family as a unit. Econom-
ics, class, and even gender roles and issues seem to
supersede any concern with race Elder might have
had. Although they do so through illegitimate
means, Theo and his endorsing father pursue,
blindly and selfishly, the American Dream. Both
Theo and Blue unsympathetically exploit Bobby,
who is learning disabled, leading to Bobby’s death.
Adele’s quest for independence from her father
and brothers and for a meaningful romantic re-
lationship in her life is achieved, in the end, with
a terrible price. Questions of existential responsi-
bility abound. Nonetheless, the viewer is left with
the conviction that the friendship that Parker and
Jenkins share will, in the end, provide balm in the
Parker family’s Gilead.
In 1969 Ceremonies in Dark Old Men was
nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. It won the Outer
Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Vernon
Rice Award, the Stella Holt Memorial Playwright
Award, and the Los Angeles Drama Critic Award.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cherry, Wilsonia E. D. “Lonnie Elder III.” In Diction-
ary of Literary Biography Vol. 38: Afro-American
Writers after 1955, edited by Thadious M. Davis
and Trudier Harris, 97–103. Detroit: Gale Re-
search Company, 1985.
Wilfred D. SamuelsEllis, Trey (1962– )
Novelist, screenwriter, and journalist Trey Ellis
was born in 1962 in Washington, D.C., the son of
a psychiatrist and a psychologist. After attending
the acclaimed private school Phillips Academy,
in Andover, Massachusetts, Ellis graduated from
Stanford University. Ellis has published three nov-
els—Platitudes (1988), Home Repairs (1992), and
Right Here Right Now (1999)—and written several
screenplays, including the Inkwell (1992) and the
HBO film The Tuskegee Airmen, for which he was
nominated for an Emmy.
Ellis’s debut novel, Platitudes, was published
to great acclaim. The novel records the writing
collaboration of two black novelists—the failing
black experimental novel writer DeWayne Wash-
ington and the successful feminist novelist Isshee
Ayam—in the coming-of-age story of two black
middle-class teenagers, Dorothy and Earle, grow-
ing up in New York City in the 1980s. The novelists
engage in ideological battles while they alternate
writing the tragic comedy of Dorothy and Earle’s
story. Although the novel ostensibly focuses on il-
luminating the lives of the black middle class, it
is also engaged with debates within the African-
American literary tradition between realist and
experimental fiction, the latter of which is associ-
ated with such writers as ISHMAEL REED, CLARENCE
MAJOR, and JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN.
Ellis explores this subject in greater detail in
“The New Black Aesthetic,” a manifesto of sorts166 Ellis, Trey