The Great Privation

You think, we carry our ancestors with us?

No. I do think there are hints they leave for us though. In our walk. Or maybe I don’t know. In the soil. I don’t know.

1832: a mother and daughter stand vigil behind the African Baptist Church in Philadelphia at the grave of a recently deceased loved one. Today, on the same grounds: another strangely familiar mother and daughter work as counselors at what is now a sleepaway camp. Timelines collide, horrors are buried and revealed, but love never lacks.

The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar) is a darkly comic play about our nation’s long practice of harming Black bodies in the name of scientific progress, our responsibility to time, and the role joy plays in living with a history we cannot change.