[In the excerpt below, Duberman gives a sharply negative appraisal of Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, judging it "bad art. "]

The critical praise for [Ray Mclver's God is a (guess what?)] was as nothing compared to the hosannahs that greeted the Ensemble Company's second production, Lonne Elder Ill's Ceremonies in Dark Old Men. The play almost won the Tony award for best of the year (and perhaps it should have, since the winner, The Great White Hope … may have had even less to recommend it). Ceremonies centers on a contemporary Harlem family but the relationships that contribute to its collapse, especially the relationship between the two sons, are at once so incompletely and so predictably developed that the tale becomes an interminable cliché. Nor did the production offer many compensations—as it usually does with the talented Ensemble Company. Some performances, particularly Samual Blue Jr.'s, were simply bad; others, like Douglas Turner's as the father, were uneven. For this Edmund Cambridge, the director, undoubtedly bears much responsibility. With a wordy script under constant threat of stagnation, the acting pace should have been varied, quick, sometimes glancing; instead, Cambridge belabored every line, apparently in the dazed belief, shared by most of the critics, that he was dealing with a prose master-piece.

Like all bad art, Ceremonies has interest only as sociology—and precious little even then. According to a "black militant" whom Newsweek invited to be guest critic of Ceremonies, the play tells us "where it's at." I wonder. If Ceremonies had been written by a white, it might well have been denounced by the militants as a tissue of clichés and slanders, for the portrait of black life which it draws is a compound of middle-class hopes and aspirations generously sprinkled with dope, sex and the rackets. If this is "where it's at," then old-fashioned liberals should take heart: blacks, it would seem from the play, are not so different from whites as the militants have been insisting, and such differences as do exist spring not from mysterious new ingredients like "soul," but from old familiars like a higher incidence of sexual activity and drug addiction. I, for one, am not convinced.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY