Target Margin Theater’s This Is Real counts among its influences the Declaration of Independence, “Home on the Range,” the Aeneid, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, and the writings of Jean Genet.

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?”