In the middle of the night in autumn 1832, a mother and her teenage daughter stand guard beside a freshly filled grave. They are not certain they need to be there, but Missy Freeman, the newly widowed mother, suspects the rumors are true: that body snatchers, also known as resurrectionists, have been digging up Black corpses and stealing them away.
When a young white man appears in the darkness, Missy knows he has come to disinter her husband, Moses, dead of cholera and laid to rest only that afternoon. With impeccable composure, she tells the grave robber, who is a medical student, that they are there to pray. He backs off, menacingly.
“Be sure to not get caught by the police,” he says. “Ladies shouldn’t be out so late.”
In Nia Akilah Robinson’s new play, “The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar),” Missy (Crystal Lucas-Perry) and her daughter, 16-year-old Charity (Clarissa Vickerie), will not be deterred from keeping vigil while Moses’s body decomposes.
As Charity says: “We must make it to three days with Daddy untouched. Then the bad men won’t return.”
Directed by Evren Odcikin for Soho Rep, “The Great Privation” rummages around in the tainted soil of the United States and pulls up some shameful old skeletons for inspection. From the start, though, a defiant light radiates through this tale, and comedy shares space with disquietude. Warm, dexterous central performances from Lucas-Perry and Vickerie (a graduate student at Juilliard making her Off Broadway debut) have a lot to do with that.
Informed by the history of Black bodies being used without consent in medical research, the play takes place on the same plot of land two centuries apart. In the 1800s, it is the burial ground at the African Baptist Church in Philadelphia, not far from Jefferson Medical College. In our time, it is a sleep-away summer camp where Minnie Chillous (Lucas-Perry), née Freeman, and her daughter, Charity (Vickerie), happen to be working as counselors alongside the amusingly dramatic John (Miles G. Jackson) and their strait-laced supervisor, Cuffee (Holiday).
Modern-day Charity — rebellious, irreverent, smart — is eager to know more about her matrilineal heritage, hoping to find heroes who might come in handy for a college application essay. Instead, in a plot twist reminiscent of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Appropriate,” she discovers historical violence. The way Charity and Minnie respond to that unearthed legacy is quite beautiful, and deliberately Shakespearean.
Another echo, early in the play, comes when the grave robber, John (also played by Jackson), intrudes on Missy and Charity in the cemetery — a disruption as jarring, if not as heightened, as the one by the white interloper with the picnic basket in Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s “Pass Over.”
Next to Moses’s grave stands an enormous tree, its thickly textured bark resembling interwoven roots. (The set is by Mariana Sanchez.) Throughout, a digital time clock hangs above the stage: a hint that realism is not to be expected. Starting at 72:00:00, it counts down the hours of the safeguarding of Moses’s body, though the clock is presented without context, so the numbers’ significance may not be evident.
Robinson, a graduate playwriting student at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, is comfortable with audience confusion, wanting somewhat to blur then with now. Yet a pivotal scene in which the 19th and 21st centuries mingle would land more powerfully with a touch more clarity. There are a couple of spots, too, where characters sound less like themselves than mouthpieces for the author.
But those are quibbles. “The Great Privation” is the first Soho Rep production in the company’s temporary home at Playwrights Horizons, and it feels reassuringly like Soho Rep: robust, questing, enlivening new work, now whipped up in Hell’s Kitchen.
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