Theatre in Review: The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar) (Soho Rep)If you were worried that in moving to 42nd Street and sharing digs with Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep had gone "uptown," I offer the example of The Great Privation (How to flip tent cents into a dollar): It's a time-traveling black comedy/historical drama packed with wisecracks, speech-making, horror-movie elements, and a Black Lives Matter theme. It also ends with a shabooya roll call. (Look it up; I had to.) Rest assured: The folks at Soho Rep are as cheerfully gonzo as ever. The Great Privation... (a title that has only a nodding acquaintance with the play's subject) begins in 1832, as Philadelphia is ravaged by cholera; Moses Freeman, a Black man, has died of it and his wife, Charity, his daughter, are keeping watch over his grave. Then John, a white doctor, arrives and, in the tense negotiation that follows, the playwright, Nia Akilah Robinson, artfully makes implicitly clear that the women are trying to save their loved one from grave robbing. (John's aim is medical research; to him, obtaining consent is beside the point.) The discussion becomes much more explicit when the school's Black janitor arrives to pressure the women. Accused by Mrs. Freeman of betraying his own kind, he argues that he is serving science, adding, "When the 20th or 21st century gets here/There will be no more deaths due to cholera/Or tuberculosis/The fevers/None of it." Oh, for a crystal ball to learn about COVID, influenza, and the H1N1 virus. Not to mention the measles. Before the matter can be settled, the action is yanked to present-day Philadelphia where Minnie and her daughter Charity are working as camp counselors along with John, an amusingly whiny, overdramatic, aspiring actor. All three gather on breaks to complain about Cuffee, their rules-bound supervisor. Minnie and Charity, New Yorkers, are in Pennsylvania for the summer, living with Minnie's mother, who isn't long for this world. Charity, meanwhile, wants to know about her family's shrouded history; why, she wonders, does she know so little about her ancestors? That's a good question; as it happens, the summer camp was built on a graveyard site, and the mess hall was once a church. And, as a topper, Minnie, Charity, John, and Coffee all have links to Mrs. Freeman, Charity, John, and the janitor. You see, there's this locked box filled with incriminating documents... If The Great Privation were a person, it would suffer from multiple personality disorder; having established her twin plot lines with a brazen contrivance, Robinson struggles to bring them together in a dramatically meaningful way. Also, having reached an apparent climax, the play goes on for several more scenes; finally, the actors break characters and take part in an admittedly riotous self-affirmation. (See "shabooya.") But until it runs out of gas in the last fifteen or twenty minutes, the play is engaging, provocative, and startlingly funny. The 1832 scenes are creepily gripping, the outrageousness of the white medical establishment's body-snatching ways underscored by Robinson's tense, understated dialogue. To be sure, the playwright is an equal-opportunity provocateur. Mrs. Freeman recalls being sold by her mother to a white household. "Apparently, the Quakers helped make that happen," she says. "Which is why I don't like them very much either." Noting, bitterly, that the "resurrectionists," such as John, are aided by members of the Black churches, she adds, "In some ways, it's the more wealthy Black folks/Against the poor Black folks/I don't know/I feel like it's always been that way." The often-hilarious contemporary scenes are packed with well-observed barbs; wait for the moment when Minnie and Charity discover their earning power compared to John and Cuffee. Minnie, taking a dim view of Charity's desire to probe their family's past, warns, "What if we were just people, daughter? You want a talented tenth family to rave about?" "You're gaslighting me," snaps Charity. Minnie, fed up, says "You're saying young people terms that feel made up and it's giving me a headache." Charity replies, philosophically, "This is what happens when you talk to millennials." Yes, we've all been there, but Robinson is equally sympathetic to mother and daughter. If the director, Evren Odcikin, can't impose much order on this bifurcated, bipolar proceedings, he gets lively performances from his cast of four. Crystal Lucas-Parry is an imposing presence as two different seen-it-all matriarchs. In her Off-Broadway debut, Clarissa Vickerie makes both Charities into charming troublemakers, whether sneaking out to sip whiskey with a boyfriend in 1832 or, today, cheerfully putting her vandalism on TikTok for all the world to see. (She defaced a racist monument at her school and isn't the least bit repentant.) Dismissing her mother's fears that her transgression will mar her higher education chances, she airily insists, "The right college will vibe with my video." Miles G. Jackson is eerily funereal as the 19th-century John, and riotously stereotypical as his 21st-century gay alter ego. The mononymic Holiday invests the janitor with a formidable self-righteousness; as Cuffee, he slyly drops many surprises about his seemingly bland character. The stage is dominated by the enormous tree designed by Mariana Sanchez, woven together using chunky pieces of fabric and packed with LED tape. If the rest of the stage looks starkly empty, it's still a powerful piece of stagecraft; in one scene, the tree actually seems to breathe. Kara Harmon's costumes and Marika Kent's lighting are solid achievements. I can't explain the significance of the digital clock that keeps ticking backward, but it was supplied by the projection designer Maxwell Bowman. Tosin Olufolabi's highly effective sound design includes train whistles, wind, bird wings, an eerie whisper montage, and the canny use of reverb for a nighttime scene in which 21st-century John encounters Mrs. Freeman and her daughter. Is The Great Privation... messy? Without question. Is it engaging, amusing, and packed with unsettling points to make? Absolutely. Even if its passion sometimes gets the better of it, this marks the debut of a playwright to remember. Soho Rep is doing just fine in its new home. --David Barbour 
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