About This Show
The Great Privation is about Grave Robbing: Grave Robbing during the early 1800’s. Grave Robbing during the Cholera outbreak. Grave Robbing in Pennsylvania. Robbing of Black bodies for medical research. Black bodies that were commodified even after death. Black bodies that never got their rest. In early 1800’s Pennsylvania, a mother and daughter keep vigil at a grave. Today, at a Summer Camp on the same grounds, a new, yet not entirely different mother and daughter navigate a new, yet not entirely different landscape. Alongside them, two distinct male figures move in and out of both sets of lives, threatening to unearth dark truths – or to help create them. As timelines collide and secrets and lives become buried and revealed, a reckoning comes calling to them all: the roots to our ancestors are not as long as we may think.