Date/Time
Date(s) - 05/28/2026 - 06/14/2026
All Day
Location
Theatre Exile
Categories
Theatre Exile’s season finale — The Great Privation: How to flip ten cents into a dollar (The Great Privation) — chronicles the disturbing story of grave robbing at Black burial sites. Get ready to be shocked by Nia Akilah Robinson’s powerful and insightful play. The production, directed by Ontaria Kim Wilson, will shine a light on a dark part of American history. It will focus on the brutal practices in the 18th and 19th centuries when Philadelphia’s growing medical schools needed cadavers. Until Pennsylvania’s Anatomy Act of 1883 stopped the ungodly practice, “resurrectionists” were paid to rob graves and sell recently-buried bodies to anatomical halls for medical dissection. Poor and Black Philadelphians were subjects of these robbing-the-dead crimes, resulting in families guarding burial sites to protect the remains of deceased loved ones.
In 1832, a mother and daughter held a vigil at the grave of deceased loved ones at the South Philadelphia church. Fast forward to modern-day Philadelphia, where a summer camp on the grounds of that same burial site creates an enduring scene. This time, a new but not-so-different mother and daughter sing camp songs to prevent the daughter from being expelled. Generations unite them, as the past mirrors the present, and secrets of the living and dead will be revealed.
Theatre Exile, 340 S. 13th St. The May 28th opening: $10 per ticket; $25 per ticket thereafter; time vary: 3 p.m. & 7 p.m. Theatre Exile, 340-48 S. 13th St., 215-218-4022, boxoffice@theatreexile.org or theatreexile.org