The Great Privation 2025

Opened: February 26, 2025
Closing: March 26, 2025

The Great Privation - 2025 Off-Broadway History , Info & More

Cast History Photos More to Do

Playwrights Horizons

416 West 42nd St.(between 9th & 10th Aves) New York, NY 10036

Run Type Limited Run

Market Off-Broadway

Previews February 26, 2025

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.

The Great Privation - 2025 - Off-Broadway Cast

Crystal Lucas-Perry

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FEATURED REVIEWS FOR The Great Privation

‘The Great Privation’ digs up the bones of one family’s history (Off Broadway review)

From: Culture Sauce By: Thom Geier Date: 2025-03-11

7 / 10

At times, The Great Privation can also feel a bit diffuse and undercooked. Some scenes meander pleasantly without advancing either the story or the underlying themes, and the ending plays more like the result of exhaustion than intention. This feels like a show that could have benefited from another revision or two, to tighten its time-jumping connections and to sharpen its point of view. (There are no clear antagonists in the present day, which deprives those scenes of dramatic tension.) But I’d gladly spend more time with these characters, as authentic and engaging and alive as the talented cast has made them, and to sink into future worlds that spring from Robinson’s fertile imagination.

THE GREAT PRIVATION: BLACK FAMILY HISTORY LOST AND FOUND

From: New York Stage Review By: Michael Sommers Date: 2025-03-11

6 / 10

Much of the play is serious in nature, but just like that heavenly apparition, funny moments sporadically occur. Not all of the elements and themes of The Great Privation meld, nor does the patchy story conclude so much as simply stop when the characters inexplicably erupt into a Shabooya sort of roll call chant that blends into the actors’ bows. Although the playwright cannot (or perhaps chooses not to) tie together its myriad parts, The Great Privation retains interest as an ambitious if not always compelling work. For better or worse, the play represents the kind of challenging composition from a fresh voice that audiences expect from Soho Rep.