The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar)

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Nia Akilah Robinson’s The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar) is now getting its United States premiere after being first developed, produced by, and performed at London’s Theatre503 last year.  It is a genre-bending fusion of time-traveling black comedy and historical drama, delivering a sharp blend of biting humor, impassioned speeches, and chilling horror-movie moments, all while poignantly exploring an aspect of the Black Lives Matter movement that doesn’t come up in every conversation.

While there are plenty of laughs in The Great Privation, we never lose sight of the fact the subject matter has roots in the history of medical exploitation. Previous mainstream pieces have appeared in recent years: Rebecca Skloot’s #1 New York Times bestseller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, about a black woman whose cells were taken without her consent and unbeknownst to her contributed to numerous medical breakthroughs, and Behind The Sheet, Charly Evon Simpson’s 2019 play presented by Ensemble Studio Theatre, loosely based on the story of J. Marion Simms, a gynecology pioneer whose progress (and success) was built on the suffering of enslaved women.

Robinson here turns her attention to the practice of bodysnatching in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, highlighting how medical education was often rooted in the exploitation of marginalized communities. Over the centuries, medicine has ventured down many morally ambiguous paths in its quest for knowledge, and the procurement of cadavers for dissection stands as one of its darkest chapters. While the study of human remains is an essential component of medical education, offering insights that cannot be gained elsewhere, the acquisition of bodies has historically posed a significant ethical dilemma. Reluctance to surrender the bodies of loved ones for the “greater good” of science has been a constant barrier. So, how did medical schools meet the demand for cadavers? For many institutions, the answer lay in accepting bodies obtained illegally, often without familial consent. The graveyards of poor and Black communities were frequently the ones exploited to provide these remains, highlighting the grim intersection of medical progress and racial and social inequities.

Robinson explains the parenthetical title, “I learned about grave robbing and organ trafficking from my parents, my first teachers. I didn’t want to believe it, and I think I wrote this to help that horrified younger me. The second part of the title, ‘how to flip ten cents into a dollar,’ is an expression first taught to me by them, which for me means, ‘how, when with little, can we make something great in life.’ In reference to this play, I hope to take us all on a journey about a history we cannot change, and its impact on the descendants of that history.”

The play shifts between two time periods, both set in the same location. In 1832, Mrs. Freeman (Crystal Lucas-Perry) and her daughter Charity (Clarissa Vickerie) are at a graveyard behind a Philadelphia church, grieving the recent loss of Moses, the husband and father, respectively. As they attempt to fulfill his dying wish of sending his spirit back to Sierra Leone, their mourning is interrupted by John (Miles G. Jackson), a university student intent on exhuming Moses’s body for medical research. Mother sends him away telling him she and her daughter are praying. The next night, an unnamed janitor (Holiday) enters tasked with collecting the corpse which the university is willing to pay for. Instead, Mrs. Freeman pays the janitor handsomely to just walk away (with his tools).

In the present day, the church has been replaced by the break room of a sleepaway summer camp, where a present day Charity (Vickerie), her mother Minnie (Lucas-Perry), a very “camp” camp counselor John (Jackson), and their by-the-rules supervisor Cuffee (Holiday) are working. Minnie and Charity, both from Harlem, are spending the summer in Philadelphia—Minnie to care for her dying mother in her last stages of cancer, and Charity to fulfill a punishment for vandalizing school property (last remnants of a Whites Only drinking fountain) in a viral TikTok video. Meanwhile, John harbors resentment toward Cuffee, who has ascended to a management role despite having worked fewer summers. The break room is where we learn the further disparity in pay scale for the two women, an insult to the mom who has worked five years for this company.

As the two timelines converge, the play takes on a supernatural tone, enhanced by Mariana Sánchez’s minimalist scenic design, punctuated by a colossus of a tree, which takes up enough space to more than satisfy as the “ninth character” in this play. Marika Kent’s eerily atmospheric lighting comes to life most dramatically under the fat limbs that look more like human arms breathing on their own than they do branches.

Kara Harmon’s period costumes for the women are stunning and place us firmly in 1832. The marvel is the quick changes from floor-length dresses with bustles to t-shirts and jeans for the camp counselors.  There’s an in-joke in there somewhere for a scene that mixes the shirts and full period dress bottoms, certainly a conscious mix of eras rather than not making their rushed timings for a full costume change. Jackson is in period costume and overcoat for 1832 but strips down to t-shirt and shorts for his counselor role. Holiday has a period overcoat over his 1832 janitor outfit and comfortable clothing for his counselor supervisor role. His entrance as a Black Jesus is quite comical – a mix of Red from the Angry Birds series and a mock Superfly-era pimp with a red feathered hat, one alligator shoe and one Jordan (so he can be stylish and still play a game of Hoops if need be).

Director Evren Odcikin assembles an exemplary cast for this play. Lucas-Perry and Vickerie bear the heavy lifting of the production in scenes that leave us thoroughly enraptured by the utterly convincing mother-daughter relationships in both eras. It would seem these two actresses have performed together their entire lives. Jackson plays the villainous student doctor who comes to claim the recently departed to the hilt and clearly sashays with glee as the whiny camp counselor who introduces the women to the midnight hauntings of the campground. Holiday is a consummate janitor who is just trying to do his job but reveals a depth to Cuffee as he shares the put-upon pressures of being the first black and first gay counselor supervisor the company has ever promoted. His accompanying the women to the unearthing of their ancestor’s grave is a touching moment that takes us by surprise. Odcikin does well to let the actors find their rhythms in navigating the scenes with the deepest emotional payoffs.

Robinson, a graduate playwriting student at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, embraces audience confusion, intentionally blurring the lines between past and present. However, a key scene where the 19th and 21st centuries collide would have greater impact with just a bit more clarity. There are also moments when characters seem less like fully realized individuals and more like vehicles for the author’s ideas. A digital clock that hovers close to the ceiling does the women of 1832 no great favors. It is meant to delineate the hours (72, to be exact) that must be counted down until the spirit of the deceased patriarch has made its way to “the other side,” which directly connotes when the body would decompose enough to not be of use to the medical students. For an audience, it is a contemporary distraction to a scene taking place before the advent of digital-anything.

That said, these are minor concerns. The Great Privation marks the first production at Soho Rep’s temporary home at Playwrights Horizons, and it unmistakably carries the company’s signature: a vibrant, daring, and thought-provoking new work, now brought to life uptown.

The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar) (through March 23, 2025)

Soho Rep

The Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.sohorep.org/shows/the-great-privation/

Running time: 100 minutes without an intermission