Theatre Exile presents Nia Akilah Robinson’s The Great Privation (How to Flip Ten Cents into a Dollar)

As the city and country approach the 250th anniversary of America’s independence, local theater companies must decide how they want to meet the moment. Embrace the bland nostalgia of 1776? Endorse the tongue-in-cheek insouciance of Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play? Perhaps the stance taken by Robinson proves the most effective: the playwright reminds her audience that the personal has always been political, and the seeds of former eras bear sweet and bitter fruit in the present day.

Transformation without change

An ambitiously structured comedy/drama, The Great Privation shows how a single place can transform over time without entirely changing. In 1832, Missy Freeman (Rayne) and her daughter Charity (Semaja Murphy) stand watch over the freshly interred body of Moses Freeman, their husband and father, amid a devastating cholera outbreak in the Northeast. It would be a spoiler to explicitly state why they’re keeping this particular watch, but it quickly becomes clear that the men who visit the African Baptist Church’s graveyard—John (Aidan McDonald) and Cuffee (Andre G. Brown), both affiliated with Jefferson Medical College—aren’t coming to pay respect.

In 2026, another mother and daughter—Minnie and Charity, also played by Rayne and Murphy—find themselves in Philly on an extended visit from Harlem, working at a summer camp and wrestling with their own lineage. Interacting with their co-workers (played again by McDonald and Brown) and in proximity to an eerily familiar graveyard, they find the veil between worlds growing suspiciously tenuous.

Uneven elements

Across 90 unbroken minutes, Robinson waxes poetical, embraces the supernatural, and infuses her human story with the essence of a thriller. (Dahlia Al-Habieli’s expressionistic set design has one very literal touch: a countdown clock that seems to situate certain scenes in real time.) Having the same four actors play multiple characters in different periods, some with the same names, underlines explicitly the metaphorical points the author finds herself making.

Yet although the play moves fluidly between its time points, the script feels lopsided: the 1832 scenes are strong, distinctive, and floridly written, while the contemporary action doesn’t possess the same gravitas. Minnie has compelling reasons to take her child away from New York—in addition to caring for family members, it emerges that Charity faces some trouble due to TikTok activism—but they remain underexplored compared to other plot elements. Director Ontaria Kim Wilson creates too much distance between the separate spheres, and it sometimes feels like you’re watching two plays that have been inelegantly stitched together.

Dramatic and daring

Exile’s production has two undeniable triumphs, though. The first is Lindsay Alayne Stevens’s haunted, spectral lighting, which especially infuses the graveyard scenes with a mounting sense of terror. The other is Rayne, whose formidable presence establishes Missy and Minnie as forces to be reckoned with. The other actors, while confident, are not on the same level.

Despite the occasional heavy-handedness and the inclination to bite off more than it can chew, you have to respect The Great Privation for taking big, dramatic swings and for its unapologetic theatricality. It might be messy, but it’s frequently daring and rarely boring. And in its message that the present is often still the past, it feels especially suited to meet the moment.

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