A life of strife PBRC’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Some conflicts brought to the theater stage never get old. Family life is one, since variations on strife and striving provide a bottomless cornucopia. Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, by Lonnie Elder III, packs in plenty of both.

The production at Providence Black Repertory Company (through November 20) underscores that timelessness, under Rochel Coleman’s directing. This staging — an adaptation, really — takes the ’60s classic and shows how undereducated African-American men who feel less-than will make the same mistakes today, and how a strong woman in the family will be left to take up the slack.

We’re not in Harlem but in Providence now. The men in the Parker family are doing what they can to survive with pride intact, even if that means letting their sister be the breadwinner. The frustration and rage rings true, although at least a couple of social artifacts keep this a period play in its storyline. if not its emotional undercurrents. Quaintly, bootlegging is the criminal enterprise of choice instead of drugs. And when first staged in 1969, the elaborate enterprise of the "community leader" here was supposed to bring to mind Black Panther calls to a revolution that would provide both milk for the schoolchildren and a little bank-robbing for the grown-ups.

When the play opens, we’re plunged into a compelling ultimatum that’s been put to the nominal patriarch of the family, Russell B. Parker (Ricardo Pitts-Wiley). Daughter Adele (Mia Anderson) is sick and tired of supporting her layabout father and her two brothers, an indulgence that put her hard-working mother in the grave. So she has given the menfolk seven days to get jobs or get out, despite her father speaking for more than his own oppressed generation when he laments, "I can’t work. I don’t know how to." (Ceremonies is a poorly constructed piece of writing, so their deadline to get out ranges from one week to the next day to two weeks. This has no effect on the story other than to deflate the pressure they’re under to change their lives.)

Hobbling over a cane these days, Russell used to be a vaudeville dancer, and at every opportunity, Pitts-Wiley has him soar joyfully in talking about the old days — even making two months of hardship on a chain gang uproarious. He has spent the past seven years in his little barbershop, hardly ever inconvenienced by a customer showing up. Every day he plays checkers with his friend Mr. Jenkins (Mishell Lilly).

Most of the performances succeed better than the play does. As son Theopolis, Raidge is a smoldering stub of burnt-out ambitions, most recently as a painter unencumbered by talent. He’s the one who comes up with a plan to get them free of his sister’s threat to put them out on the street: crime. He has made a batch of corn liquor that everyone says is first-rate, so he convinces Russell to use his shop as a front for selling black lightning.

Offering police protection and distribution is that above-mentioned community leader, Blue Haven (Jim Pope), initially all pinstriped suit and smooth assurances. Pope is perfect for the role, glibly delivering the gangster’s idealistic poetical palaver about the black man’s place in the world but also maintaining a soulful wistfulness beneath each lie or exaggeration. Toward the end, Pope offhandedly delivers the most powerful monologue of the play, sketching a home life of hard-won tenderness and reluctant violence that will break your heart.

Brother Bobby is a soft-spoken, quietly smiling presence that Keith Mascoll makes lurk here like a time bomb. He’s famous in the neighborhood as a shoplifter, but we sense potential menace from some abrupt responses to his younger, smarter brother. Their new partner in crime has greater plans for Bobby, the riskier business of breaking into stores rather than just slipping merchandise into his pockets.

Of course, nobody’s plan here goes as planned. Adele hoped to have time for a life of her own if she didn’t have to take care of three men, but she didn’t remember that she’d have to settle for damaged men like them. In his spiffy new suit, Russell just wanted to find a woman who would love him back but instead runs into one who just wants the money he’s come into. Bobby strains to get out from under his brother’s shadow, but there are shadows all around. No, things haven’t changed much at all.