The Brooklyn Rail

Near the end of Nia Akilah Robinson’s play The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar), Charity holds her ancestor’s skull in her hands. Standing in a shallow grave, she places him back into the casket he was stolen from almost two centuries before. She does not feel any better.

“These bones haunt me mama,” she says. “Aren’t they everywhere? How can you bear to walk outside anymore?”

It’s an impossible question to answer. Both women, without record of their ancestry, have been left with little but the echoes of the bones around them in the place of a family tree. The Great Privation chronicles this particular kind of anguish, passed down through generations of Black Americans whose lineage has been stolen through violence or force. When Robinson was only thirteen, her parents sat her down to have a conversation about the countless Black bodies robbed to be used in medical research. Now, in her off-Broadway debut with SoHo Rep., she’s written a play for her teenage self, working with director Evren Odcikin to treat somber subjects with exceptional heart and humor. In the 1832 timeline, a mother/daughter pair stand watch at their loved one’s grave. In the present day, their ancestors feel something at the same place and don’t know why.

“There’s this longing that I’ve felt, and folks in my life have felt, asking who am I? Why do I feel strange around these parts when I travel somewhere? Could I be near an African burial ground?” Robinson told the Rail. “I’m mourning the loss of lineage and information.”

In an author’s note, Robinson writes, provocatively, that “we are not our ancestors.” Her play, however, teaches us that we’re inescapably linked to them, and that we cannot know who we are without knowing them first. “I want to know where we come from,” present day Charity tells her mother, urging her to explore the connection they feel to the campground. She and her mother are functionally the same in both timelines—same actors, same clothes, same indelible bond. In certain moments of kinetic frenzy, the two slip in and out of timelines from one line to the next, indistinguishable to audience and actor alike. Another of Robinson’s authors notes reads: “there may be confusion that arises between when you are ‘modern’ & and when you ‘aren’t’. That is the point.”

“It’s an exploration of two timelines desperately trying to say hello to each other,” Robinson said.

The chief victim of this confusion is John, a white man who grave robs in 1832 and camp counsels alongside the women in the present day. In the 1800s, as a student at a medical college who has made monumental strides researching cholera (the disease that killed Charity’s father), he presents a wonderfully subtle moral dilemma: can the atrocity of grave robbing possibly be good for the world? The medical college’s Janitor (Holiday), sent to collect the body one night, wonders if, with this research, cholera might even be eradicated in a few years.

“It’s for science,” he says. “We do it to advance science.”

Mother rightly points out that the progress being made will not be available to the very community it harms, and that only white folks will benefit from a cure. Still, however, the question lingers. This is the third successive play Odcikin has worked on that dealt with issues of medical justice. As more scholarship emerges on the subject, an increasing number of families have had to grapple with all sides of the issue, the advantages in equal part with the atrocities. More and more communities without a past—African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and refugees—have felt hauntings that only art can describe.

“I think a lot of us artists have been living with these feelings and emotions that don’t seem to have a root,” Odcikin said. “We have artists like Nia and others who are writing into that because art, theater specifically, is the place where you can dig into those emotions and not have to make sense of them, and find reflection from your audience and your collaborators.”

Confronted with desecration, our natural impulse is to seek retribution, to ask how we can right the wrongs of the past. How, we wonder, can we get justice for all the violence that’s been done to Charity, Mother, and countless others like them? It’s fascinating, then, that Odcikin doesn’t think these are the right questions to be asking. Instead, as he eloquently describes, the first step to justice is always healing. If those suffering from a great lack can feel themselves reflected on the stage, they’ll leave the theater feeling lighter, recognized. The historical truths we live with on a daily basis are massive, and theater is the place we go to share the weight.

“My hope for this play is that folks whose lineage has been impacted by these things can see a reflection in it, and can see that what they're feeling is being felt by others,” Odcikin said. “If we could do whatever we need to do to heal ourselves, maybe there might be a hope towards something better.”

Something better, unfortunately, still has not come. In her specific instructions for how the play should end, Robinson lays out a number of guidances—a euphoric Shabooya dance party to cut the tension, a box in the lobby with a gift for all the folks in attendance—but none are more striking than the banner unfurled as the audience is leaving. It reads:

Bodies are still subject to being used for Medical
Research without consent from that person.
Especially folk who are a part
of an unhoused population.
It varies from state to state but
the research is alarming.

An NBC investigation from 2024 found a medical university and center in Texas using hundreds of unclaimed bodies, primarily unhoused people of color, for their research. They leased out legs and torsos to different departments, even while families were continuing to search incessantly for their missing loved ones. In one instance, even after finding them, the remains weren’t allowed to return home for another year and a half; the family was told that the center wasn’t done using it. Even while privately defending the practice, when the story broke, the center immediately suspended it and fired the officials who led it.

Our timeline touches what came before it. Robinson herself is unsure of our relationship with our ancestors, but she knows that we’re related to them, facing the same kinds of horrors hundreds of years later.

“The past that we are promised no longer exists / repeats and invades our present disguised as something new,” says Mother.

She’s right. Even if the generation is different, the bones are always the same.