The Great
Privation
(How to flip ten cents into a dollar)
by Nia Akilah Robinson
directed by Evren Odcikin
February 26 2025 - March 23 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.
Our first production at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Playwrights Horizons. Tickets will go on sale in January.
Creative Team
Nia Akilah Robinson
Playwright
Nia Akilah Robinson (she/her) is a playwright and actor who reps Harlem with all her might. Her work has been seen and developed with Steppenwolf Theatre, The Hearth, The New Group, Theatre503 (UK), The Ground Floor: Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Great Plains Theatre Conference, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Waterwell, Classical Theatre of Harlem, Urbanite, and New Georges. She has been a MacDowell Fellow, Travis Bogard Eugene O’Neill Foundation Fellow, and a writer for PEN America and EST/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (short play). Nia has had residencies at NYSAF and The Pocantico Center through YoungArts. Nia’s work is featured through the 46th Bay Area Playwrights Festival, The Fire This Time Festival, and the 48th Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival. She participated in the National Black Theatre Soul Series and received the 2023 Film & TV Mentorship by Mitzi Miller. She has been awarded 1st Place for the 2023 A is For Playwriting Contest (with the Wish Collective), the Next Wave Initiative Lorraine Hansberry Writing Scholarship, a Miranda Family Fund Commission, and the NYSCA Grant (CCCADI). She is shortlisted for the 2023 Theatre503’s International Playwriting Award. She was a finalist for the Audible Commission, the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Blue Ink Playwriting Award, OJAI Playwrights Conference, Jane Chambers, and The Leah Ryan Fund. She is a member or alumna of Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Youngblood, I-73 at Page 73, The Orchard Project NYCGreenhouse, The Wish Collective, and TheBlackHERthePen. She is proudly represented by Alex Gold at Creative Artists Agency. Education: David Geffen School of Drama at Yale- MFA Playwriting Candidate & Juilliard ‘24 (Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program)
Evren Odcikin
Director
EVREN ODCIKIN (he/him) is a Turkish-American director, writer, and arts leader based in New York City and San Francisco. He is committed to championing historically-excluded voices in the American theater with work that is heart-centered, politically engaged, globally minded, and centers joy as resistance. Evren is proud to be the 2024-25 Artist in Residence at Golden Thread Productions and a 2025 Iris Lab Fellow with UC Santa Cruz. Recent directing: Macbeth and Mona Mansour’s unseen (Oregon Shakespeare Festival), Torch Song (Marin Theatre), christopher oscar peña’s our orange sky (Profile Theatre), Sylvia Khoury’s Selling Kabul (Northern Stage), Amir Nizar Zuabi’s This is Who I Am (Woolly Mammoth, PlayCo, A.R.T., Guthrie, and OSF), and workshops of Adam Ashraf Elsayigh’s ALAA: A Family Trilogy (Golden Thread) and Lauren Gunderson’s Muse of Fire (Marin Shakes). Playwriting and translation: Commissions and productions at Cal Shakes, NYU Abu Dhabi, Golden Thread, Crowded Fire, and Custom Made. In 2023, he served as the Interim Artistic Director at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he had been the Associate Artistic Director and Director of Artistic Programming since 2019. Evren is a founder of Maia Directors, and serves on the Boards of Middle Eastern North African Theater Makers Alliance and Playwrights Foundation. Evren is honored to partner with Nia Akilah Robinson again after helping develop this play at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. odcikin.com
Supporters
Funding for The Great Privation is provided, in part, by the Laurents / Hatcher Foundation and the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation.