Eric Clinton as Malcolm King, Terrence Riggins as Patriarch William King, and Tenisi Davis as Ennis King. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Malcolm and Ennis stand in the kitchen, debating what a course in “Broke-ology”—the science of being broke—might look like. Malcolm, on the cusp of a new job, laughs at his brother’s insistence that it could be a real discipline. Ennis, ground down by the world around him, already has it figured out. The smell of biscuits and gravy hangs thickly in the air. Somewhere upstairs, their father is stirring. A box of dominoes, the tiles momentarily quiet, sits nearby.
“I would teach ‘How to stretch a dollar 101,’” Ennis says, jolting them back to his supposed social science. “And you would teach cooking with government cheese.”
That camaraderie, undergirded by a kind of reluctant resilience, is the focus of Nathan Louis Jackson’s Broke-ology, running at Collective Consciousness Theatre (CCT) Thursdays through Sundays from Nov. 13 through Nov. 23. Set entirely inside a single Kansas City home, the play explores male caretaking, brotherhood, poverty, and the meaning of family all under the weight of economic hardship, with a cast that makes the show feel intimately familiar.
It is directed by CCT Founder and Executive Artistic Director Dexter Singleton, with all performances at Bregamos Community Theater at 491 Blatchley Ave. Tickets and more information are available here. It is also very much an homage to Jackson, a rising star of the playwriting world who died at just 44 years old in 2023.
“This is a show that’s been on our short list for a while,” said Singleton at a tech rehearsal on Monday evening, as Jamie Burnett fiddled with the lighting board and actors slipped into their costumes at the back of the theater. “It seemed to be the right year for it. This play is about caretaking, but especially male caretakers. We rarely see that on the stage.”
Set in Kansas City in 2009—one year into a deep economic recession, although it’s never mentioned by name—Broke-ology follows two generations of the Kings, a Black family who has lost its matriarch, Sonia (Alexis Trice), to cancer well before her time. In her absence, sons Ennis (Tenisi Davis) and Malcolm (Eric Clinton) have returned home to care for their father William (Terrence Riggins), whose health has suffered following a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.
At first, everything seems controlled, if a little chaotic: William dreams of Sonia, who has been gone for 15 years, but not in a way that is alarming or out of the ordinary. Malcolm and Ennis are sweet, if a little snippy with each other, and it’s easy to see them fall back into patterns from boyhood and adolescence. The boys bring breakfast, help William with his meds, play games of dominoes, make mischief when they want to. In flashbacks, audiences get a sense of how warm and unflappable Sonia was, this woman who held everything together between her small, slender palms.
But she’s gone now, money is still as tight as it ever was, and life feels more stressful than it’s been in a long time. Ennis has a baby on the way and a dead-end job that he hates. Malcolm, who has a fancy new gig at the EPA, wants to get back to a life of science and activism that he left in Connecticut. When the two begin to fight over who will become William’s primary caregiver, they come to the kind of blows that are still blunted at the edges, softened by a fierce sense of obligation to each other.
As it comes to the stage this week, actors tell the story in masterful detail, making the King family’s life very much their business, and in turn, ours as well. When the show opens, William and Sonia are young again, as if the years have been peeled away, and there is still the space between them to dream. On the table, Sonia’s bright paints and brushes still sit half-open, as if they are ready for anything to come.
Trice, a musical theater nerd in her first straight play, is winsome and wildly creative in the role, with the kind of resolve that is somehow both steely and soft. When she smiles to herself—which is often—there is the feeling that all might be right in the world. She, like Davis, is particularly skilled at expressing emotion with no words at all, decades of feeling (and at times, also loss) etched on her young, soft face.
“Seeing the implications of the loss on Sonia as a mother and a wife, it’s profound,” she said before tech rehearsal, as she buttoned a pair of denim overalls over a padded baby bump (a shoutout to costume designer Carol Koumbaros). “I definitely resonate with that aging piece.”
Around her, the three King men deliver many times over, telling the story of Sonia’s absence in domino games, spilled and consumed chocolate milk, resurrected childhood toys, recounted dreams and old mix tapes stacked with Motown.
As the pater familias, Riggins offers up a quiet, pensive side of himself, as if something is rumbling beneath his skin every time he comes onto the stage. Yes, there’s something still there from earlier this year, when he presented Unbecoming Tragedy through CCT and Long Wharf Theatre in downtown New Haven.
But for the first time in his six shows with the small-but-mighty company, there’s something else too: an understated and devastating kind of loss that reminds people how raw and wide open a human heart can be. William may be struggling with his health—and really, aren’t we all just temporarily able bodied?—but the decisions he makes are ultimately his. He holds on to some of his power in ways that his sons don’t even recognize.
In part, Riggins attributes that gravitas, delivered in deep sighs, gravel-voiced responses and bite-sized slivers, to the glimpses of William he sees in himself. For the first time, “I feel like I’m acting my age now,” he said with a smile before Monday’s tech rehearsal. “All I have to do is play myself. That was a revelation for me.”
Both Clinton and Davis match him at every turn, filling the whole stage with their antics and their love for each other. One moment, they are stealing a Black garden gnome from a neighbor, a tightly knitted throwback to William’s distaste of Christmas (or at least, the unchecked capitalism it invites), and insistence that there be no mention of Santa in their home. “If Santa came in here with all that red, somebody would shoot him,” he says early in the show, a laugh line that is also a bitter reminder of his hope to move out of a neighborhood where Crips and Bloods are still active.
Another, and they are holding their hobbled father by the shoulders, a safety razor still suspended in his hand and a dress shirt splattered with blood beneath it. Together, they try to find the places he has accidentally cut himself while shaving, and for a moment, nothing else they’ve said to each other matters.
Davis, who is incredibly expressive, nails not just Ennis’ sense of stuck-ness, but also the financial and emotional weight of this moment, as the realities of two major life transitions collide with his always-too-tight bank account. Across from him, Clinton squarely lands the sensitive and nerdy Malcolm, whose deep care for his family may come at the expense of his own professional happiness.
When he cautions Ennis, who is explaining his theory of Broke-ology, that “just because you want something to be a science doesn’t automatically make it a science,” we are totally with him at first. It’s even a little bit of a laugh line. By the end of the show, we aren’t so sure anymore.
So much of this is achingly relatable—it wouldn’t be a play at CCT if it wasn’t. Even before cuts to federal food assistance and health care, rising rates of unemployment, and skyrocketing medical costs hit under the Trump Administration this year, the themes in Broke-ology were not foreign to New Haven, which sometimes feels like a tale of two cities. In this show, too, there’s what Singleton called “the division of the haves and have nots,” and the general anguish of watching a parent spiral toward decline.
In the audience, we see how William’s drive to be fiercely independent is painfully at odds with his failing body, a shell of what it once was. William, who once pulled extra shifts doing HVAC work to support his family, now struggles with basic tasks, like taking medication and fixing a warm breakfast for himself on the stove.
We see, too, how much the decision to stay or go eats away at Malcolm, who realizes that he cannot win. If he stays, he is sacrificing a job back in another state (this is not a spoiler; it’s introduced within the first 10 minutes of the play). If he goes, he is abandoning his father and his brother, who is about to be a dad himself for the first time. When it dawns on him, the realization that he cannot win is not just painful; it is thickly palpable, because many of us have been there too.
Clinton, who last graced the stage in Kirsten Greenidge’s Milk Like Sugar at CCT in 2017, is particularly talented here, with a sensitivity and sweetness that seems to have skipped his brother entirely. When he asks, “What if I go?” his face turns into something crushed and scowling all at once, as if he knows he is leaving whole worlds upturned with a single question. He is kind, too: gentle with William, who he misses with his whole body, wary of Ennis and still a little hungry for his approval, in a way that little brothers always are.
The set meanwhile, is an unspoken character in this show, a credit to CCT mainstays and designers David Sepulveda and Burnett. Where Bregamos’ stage normally stands, the duo have built out a full first-floor interior, complete with stocked kitchen cabinets, a comfy couch, wall art (those who saw Fairview may recognize a few things) and a fridge that houses a carton of the chocolate milk William has come to love.
It feels lived in: well-loved but not shabby, welcoming but not quite the gold standard Sonia would have liked. This is a place where memories fill every nook and cranny, and yet a person can feel Sonia’s long-gone wish to move to a better neighborhood, a gentle striving that feels, by the end of the show, very much like a dream deferred.
But if it sounds unbearably heavy, it is not, a lyrical feat that looks easy in Jackson’s hands. Even in its moments of emotional breakdown, Broke-ology brims with warmth and humor, the way some siblings can’t actually stay mad at each other for that long, because they know they’re all they’ve got at the end of the day. They know, too, that their father has tried to give them everything—and it is on them to care for him as he nears the end of his life.
Clinton, an alum of Southern Connecticut State University who is the youth pastor at Ebenezer Chapel on Dwight Street, said that the role resonated with him for that reason. A year ago, he and his wife moved in with his mother after she had surgery, for what they thought would be six or eight weeks.
But Clinton’s mom, the woman who had given him the world, contracted a blood infection that landed her back in the hospital, where she nearly died of septic shock. He remembered feeling terrified and drained all at once, as if the natural order of the world had been flipped.
“It was a very scary time,” Clinton remembered. “And I would do it all again in a heartbeat.”
“Being in this play—it’s amazing,” he added less than a minute later. “I love that it is about men being vulnerable, and especially Black men being vulnerable
Like so much of CCT’s oeuvre, the play may be tied to a specific place—Jackson grew up in Kansas City, and the city is often an unspoken character in his work—but it resonates instantly in New Haven, where race and class have become dividing lines across so many of the city’s neighborhoods. Jackson’s writing may have a very different poetry and cadence than a show like Topdog Underdog or Jesus Hopped The A Train, but that’s the gift of it. It’s three Black men, across two generations, talking about their care for each other, and in so doing, talking about the lives they have lived.
“My appreciation for this play, it grew,” Riggins said as he went over his lines one last time. At first, he explained, he was skeptical of how plain, how conversational the language seemed. But “being inside of it, I realized how wonderful it is. Just the importance of it, the natural beauty of the piece. There’s poetry in it.”
Before a run-through of the show on Monday, cast and crew members glided through the space, preparing last-minute adjustments to props (a nod to props and assistant stage manager Tara Hightower) and costumes, some turning back for their water bottles when they were halfway on their way to the stage. At a director’s table, Singleton pored over a copy of the script, Burnett fiddling with lighting cues behind him.
On stage, actors warmed up. Davis and Clinton ran through a scene one last time, listing the ostensible pros and cons of staying. Riggins worked through an entrance; Trice peered at the fridge, which crew members had stocked with chocolate milk, orange juice, and a few comestibles before the run.
Jackson’s words were everywhere, allowing him to speak beyond the veil. It was on the audience—or it would be, shortly—to listen.
“Always the intent is that it resonates locally as much as it can, and nationally at the same time,” Singleton said.