In ‘The Great Privation,’ Fending Off the Body Snatchers

Directed by Evren Odcikin for Soho Rep, “The Great Privation” rummages around in the tainted soil of the United States and pulls up some shameful old skeletons for inspection. From the start, though, a defiant light radiates through this tale, and comedy shares space with disquietude. Warm, dexterous central performances from Lucas-Perry and Vickerie (a graduate student at Juilliard making her Off Broadway debut) have a lot to do with that.

Informed by the history of Black bodies being used without consent in medical research, the play takes place on the same plot of land two centuries apart. In the 1800s, it is the burial ground at the African Baptist Church in Philadelphia, not far from Jefferson Medical College. In our time, it is a sleep-away summer camp where Minnie Chillous (Lucas-Perry), née Freeman, and her daughter, Charity (Vickerie), happen to be working as counselors alongside the amusingly dramatic John (Miles G. Jackson) and their strait-laced supervisor, Cuffee (Holiday).

Modern-day Charity — rebellious, irreverent, smart — is eager to know more about her matrilineal heritage, hoping to find heroes who might come in handy for a college application essay. Instead, in a plot twist reminiscent of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Appropriate,” she discovers historical violence. The way Charity and Minnie respond to that unearthed legacy is quite beautiful, and deliberately Shakespearean.

Another echo, early in the play, comes when the grave robber, John (also played by Jackson), intrudes on Missy and Charity in the cemetery — a disruption as jarring, if not as heightened, as the one by the white interloper with the picnic basket in Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s “Pass Over.”

Next to Moses’s grave stands an enormous tree, its thickly textured bark resembling interwoven roots. (The set is by Mariana Sanchez.) Throughout, a digital time clock hangs above the stage: a hint that realism is not to be expected. Starting at 72:00:00, it counts down the hours of the safeguarding of Moses’s body, though the clock is presented without context, so the numbers’ significance may not be evident.