Review: The Past Haunts the Present in The Great Privation

One thing you can’t accuse The Great Privation (How to Flip Ten Cents Into a Dollar) of being is polemical. Nia Akilah Robinson’s new play, making its U.S. premiere with Soho Rep., is inspired in part by an enraging bit of America’s past: the way Black bodies have been exploited, even commodified, in the name of scientific progress. But instead of using that as the launching pad for an angry screed, Robinson takes a broader, more magical-realist, lyrical approach. The lighter touch may be refreshing, but the result is a mixed blessing.

The play alternates between two time periods in the same setting. In 1832, Mrs. Freeman (Crystal Lucas-Perry) and her daughter Charity (Clarissa Vickerie) are at a graveyard behind a church in Philadelphia mourning their recently deceased patriarch, Moses. Their attempt to adhere to his wish for them to send his spirit off to his home country of Sierra Leone is interrupted by John (Miles G. Jackson), a student at a local university who seeks to dig up Moses’s grave and use his corpse for medical research. A fourth character, an unnamed janitor (played by the single-monikered Holiday), appears later to pick up that corpse, which the university is willing to pay to procure.

That church has been replaced by a summer camp in the present day, at which a girl also named Charity (Vickerie), her mother Minnie (Lucas-Perry), a fellow camp counselor also named John (Jackson), and their supervisor Cuffee (Holiday) work. Minnie and Charity, both Harlem residents, are staying in Philadelphia for the summer, Minnie to watch over her ailing mother, Charity to serve out a punishment for vandalizing school property in a viral TikTok video. John, meanwhile, resents Cuffee for being in a management position despite having worked fewer summers than he. Both timelines eventually intermingle in ways that veer into the supernatural, a vibe supported by the almost Cubist-like tree in the middle of Mariana Sánchez’s otherwise spare scenic design and Marika Kent’s spookily evocative lighting design.

Though director Evren Odcikin tries to infuse the production with a surreal flavor here and there, the poetical notions undergirding Robinson’s play remain on-the-surface literal. The doubling up of some of the character names between past and present suggests a generational trauma that Mrs. Freeman, Charity, and John have passed down to their present-day counterparts. At one point, Minnie and Charity fantasize at length about their conception of an African Jesus. And then there’s the digital clock in the foreground of the stage, which starts at 72:00:00 and counts down at various points throughout the show until it reaches 00:00:00 when Moses Freeman’s spirit has officially gone to what Mrs. Freeman and Charity call “African heaven.” Such conceits aren’t so much developed as they are tossed into a messy stew, with Robinson occasionally relying too much on speechifying to make sure we grasp their meaning.

Thankfully, Robinson’s baldly allegorical aims don’t entirely eclipse characterization. Mrs. Freeman in 1832 is ahead of her time in her refusal to work for white people, with Charity gradually learning the ways of white exploitation. By contrast, Charity in the present day is the more outwardly demonstrative in her activism—the viral TikTok video involved her spray-painting over a still-visible “Colored only” sign on a school water fountain with a Black power fist—with Minnie much more reserved, worrying about her daughter’s chances at a secondary education as a result of such a stunt. The John of 1832 and the present are similarly opposed: the former an oppressor, the latter a clumsy but well-intentioned ally.

Strong performances allied with Robinson’s acute ear for everyday speech bring a measure of warmth to these lightly sketched characters. Holiday manages to make a gentle impression even as he plays characters that are noteworthy for their chilly practicality. Jackson sharply delineates the menacing firmness of 1832 grave-robbing John and the amusing self-dramatization of present-day camp counselor John. Most importantly, though, Lucas-Perry and Vickerie are wholly convincing in their mother-daughter interactions in both time periods. Robinson may strain too hard for poetry in The Great Privation, but at least she displays laudably humane instincts, suggesting even greater artistic triumphs in the future.