Glimmers of Hope

WOOLLY MAMMOTH: Where did the seed of the idea for The Great Privation come from?
NIA AKILAH ROBINSON: The beginning of the play actually began at a dinner table with my family. Growing up, I always had interesting conversations with both parents and one of those topics ended up being grave robbing. I remember being horrified by the topic and also intrigued by its history. I also knew that I was trying to write a play for my 16 or 13-year-old self. What would I be entertained by? What would I enjoy? I am someone who enjoys laughing. The 1832 nature of it all was my first entry into the play. But the modern-day journey came from wanting to give to my younger self.
WM: Can you talk about the title?
NAR: The Great Privation, for me, alludes to the great lack of resources. And the second part of the title is “How to flip ten cents into a dollar,” which is what was taught to me by my parents. When you have a dollar and you can only buy some franks from the store, how do you make it look really nice on your dinner table? How do you take what you have and make it beautiful?
WM: Mina, what drew you to this piece?
MINA MORITA: Leading with love. It’s about surviving and being braver when we lead with love with ourselves, our families, our friends. Living
with my mom as she gets older, I’m thinking about time left, what lessons I still need to learn, what gets passed on. How do we live with good
character? The play captures that with such lightness and buoyancy, Nia— the sass of coming to terms with difficult things. The theatricality of
how time moves in memory and on the land we exist on is dynamic.
COMPANY ONE: Knowing that this play travels between 1832 and the present— how does this play treat history that is found and history that is lost?
NAR: I pay deep respect to our oral historians, to our researchers, to the folks who are diving into these materials, unearthing them. I also pay major tribute to all of our librarians, especially those at the Schomburg [Center for Research in Black Culture]. The history that is lost, that we
can’t have back or has still to this day not been granted access to us, is one I mourn and desire. I wish that I had access to more of the oral historians and the people who I could have communicated with to receive that. The acknowledgement that history is lost is one we’re always dealing with, no matter who you are, or where you come from. The questions of an untraced history are ones that we’re constantly dwelling on. That is intertwined in the play, I hope, in Charity’s desire to connect to her history, her ancestry. She’s angry, and she’s rebelling, “Why doesn’t mom know all of this?” She houses that sort of anger of the thing she cannot access.

WM:  Mina, can you talk a little bit about how the intertwining time periods inform your process? 

MM: Time moves, in western cases, linearly, but actually, in our existence and in many other cultures, time exists very differently in our memory and our understanding of ourselves in terms of our history, our ancestry, and how it affects our sense of value in our present. In the design, we’ve been talking a lot about the earth being alive and the tree roots being alive. When we skip through time in the way memory does, it has its own rhythm, and it lives in space concurrently. It’s not even a “cut to,” it’s a blending as Nia says in the script. 

CO:   Nia, you’ve described The Great Privation as a play about science. I would love to hear a little bit about how science shows up in the play and how that interest started. 

NAR: Some of the research that I was able to access was from Harriet A. Washington, from Lesley M. Rankin-Hill, from Gary B. Nash. Those are some folks who focus on science or who focused on the history of 1832. I was able to go to those resources. A point of interest for me was a janitor who worked in the medical school, who was a Black man. I was able to create this other character, inspired in some ways by that medical school janitor, because I had questions about what was it like to be this person, how do you interact with the town itself? And also know what’s happening in terms of grave robbing.  

I wondered about the levels of humanity involved in these medical students doing anatomical research. And also the levels of shame, if there was any for this person.  Where is the level? Where are the lines of science? Where are the lines of emotion? I went on this beautiful whirlwind of questions that made that character very interesting to me. I think the science about medical consent, which is what Harriet A. Washington focuses on, is such a deep and necessary question because we also can’t go back. There is consent that folks never did have, and I think that kind of anger still resides, even slowly riding into today. Now we are able to access that research and read about it, and there’s a fire that comes within me [about] how many folks did not have consent in regard to their bodies. 

CO: This conversation feels really emergent, because we’re doing a play in Boston right now about what it means to know your family history called The Meeting Tree. It’s really building up for me, what does it mean to build trust and reparative practices? I’m thinking about this in the context of what would it mean for Black communities who’ve been impacted by scientific and medical institutions, who’ve done these advancements to regain that [trust]. What does transparency look like? I do wonder if there is a call to action or a curiosity you would love to have audiences take away. 

NAR: One of the reasons the relationship to medical institutions is layered and complex is because of this history – whether and how an individual may feel safe in a doctor’s office is nuanced. It will always be nuanced, because we are always growing. And one of the goals is definitely for Black audience members to feel, at least, that by getting these bones back, there are some glimmers of hope that can spring from their hearts. I hope that by getting the bones back, there is a good thing that happened in the play.  

MM: How do you honor somebody’s own sense of agency and independence. Are we [the audience and this community] considering that in our work in the world?  

WM: The play resonates with DC and Boston which have different but related histories. What are you excited about with these two cities? 

MM: As Nia says, DC is steeped in history and when you walk around you can feel it, see it, and read about it. This is the Chocolate City. Did you know that right in Virginia, they discovered a well of remains next to the VCU’s MCV campus? Our scenic designer found this after talking about the play with a friend from that community. We are choosing to uplift our true American history between the White House and Capitol. We are choosing to tie DC to Boston which has its own challenged resurrectionist history with Harvard Medical students. Everything is intertwined. Nothing is isolated. Throughout time, it has always been easier to think these degrading things only happen to other people, but it’s all the same vein of humiliation. Any human dehumanized in any way for science or any other reason is unacceptable.