Crystal Lucas, Perry, Miles G. Jackson, and Clarissa Vickerie Photo by Julieta Cervantes

Know Porgy and Bess? The premise here reminds me of a passage from it. Crown has killed Robbins, and his widow is scrambling to come up with funeral expenses, for if she doesn't, "the board of health will take him an' turn him over to the medical students." Apparently most of the bodies used for medical research throughout American history have been Black, and that extended to robbing their graves, which persisted especially during the cholera outbreak of the early 1800s. That's what thrusts us into a Philadelphia graveyard in 1832, where Missy Freeman (Crystal Lucas-Perry) and her daughter Charity (Clarissa Vickerie) have just buried Moses Freeman.

They speak in a contemporary lingo, Hamilton-style–"OK," "word got out," "It's a mom thing"–but it's not off-putting, for our sympathies are immediately with them, and they're talking some pretty serious shit. Bans surrounding the cholera epidemic have left them virtually without food, and their efforts to protect their husband/father's grave and see his soul safely back to his Sierra Leone origins are about to be threatened.

Thus the arrival of John Petersburg (Miles G. Jackson), polite but heartless, a relative of Moses' owner and a white college student out to rob his grave. A confrontation, and then, poof, we're in the present day, in the same graveyard except it's been converted into a summer camp. There the modern-day counterparts of Mrs. Freeman and Charity are counselors, and so's John, now a chatty gay colleague of theirs. "White boys trying to talk over Black girls, am I right?" he jabbers, talking right over them. He's friendly, though, if antagonistic toward Cuffee (Holiday), their do-things-by-the-book supervisor. The Freemans are Harlemites, but are here in Pennsylvania as part of Charity's penance for vandalizing school property (in the name of Black power). Their small talk is fun, and Jackson, way more comfortable in the 2025 John's skin than the 1832 version, generates exit applause with a wink and a head tilt. His body language is eloquent, and director Evren Odcikin is wise to let him run wild with it.

We keep careening between centuries, and some things I just don't get. Why is there a digital clock at the top of the stage (the scenic design, by Mariana Sánchez, is mostly a mini-Redwood tree trunk dominating the set), constantly running backwards, then malfunctioning, then running backwards again, then shutting off? It says something about time, but what? Why does Tosin Olufololabi's sound design, which is mostly excellent, also feature a dim gong emanating from the back of the house every half-minute or so? And while Kara Harmon's costumes are entirely apt, the quick transitions between centuries sometimes leave the actors in the wrong garb; it's a head-scratcher to see the modern-day Freemans in dowdy 19th century skirts, or the 1832 John in a T-shirt and shorts.

But the link between far-apart generations is a large part of Robinson's theme. Modern-day Charity wants to know a great deal more about her forbears; she'll learn it. The 1832 people of color are enslaved, harassed, and exploited; the current Blacks are underpaid and taken for granted, and still, a screen in the lobby informs us, the prime subjects of medical research, often without their consent. But even more than that, I think, what's on Robinson's mind is mothers and daughters. Or maybe that's just the luminous playing of Lucas-Perry and Vickerie, who are so convincingly a family unit, you may be checking your program to make sure they're not related. The mom-and-daughter interactions are funny, heartfelt and deep, and the seeming ease with which Lucas-Perry and Vickerie play the familial push-pull, the love and dissing and desperate clinging to each other, is an immense pleasure to watch. Lucas-Perry's authority and ease, and Vickerie's enthusiasm and youthful exuberance, are the real engine here.

Ghosts appear, too, and a skull, and Missy and Charity's hilarious vision of "African Jesus," rendered by Holiday with red suit, feather hat, one alligator shoe and one Jordan, and dancing feet. Sometimes characters from different centuries interact, though Odcikin could have made that clearer. But what's clear, and rewarding, is Robinson's conveyance of a chapter of Black history that doesn't often get retold, and her smart, and beautifully played, depiction of mother-daughter dynamics.

Then there's the ending. I won't spoil it, but it contains the whole cast, and it's joyous. Burdened souls, but finding joy in self-expression and human connection and the ability to tune the world out when it gets to be too much, and tune back in to figure out what to do about it. A lesson, truly, for our times.