Broke-ology
Collective Theatre
Bregamos Theater
Nov. 13-Nov. 23
Actors Terrence Riggins and Alexis Trice, playing William and Sonia in Nathan Louis Jackson’s Broke-ology, paced the stage in a rehearsal Tuesday night at Collective Consciousness Theatre, preparing for the play’s upcoming run at Bregamos. It was their first run-through ever — director Dexter Singleton jokingly called it a “stumble-through” — but already the rhythms of the lines were coming together.
The chemistry between the characters, a happily married couple worn down over time by circumstances, was palpable. In their first scene, Riggins and Trice captured the younger couple’s excitement and delicate hopes for the future. In the next, their frustration turning into resignation as they understand those hopes will not be realized; and in the next and final, touching, their wordless joy in connection in the face of it all.
Singleton was pleased. “That was our first time doing the scenes together and I think it went really well.” He encouraged Riggins and Trice to take a break. Actors Tenisi Davis and Eric Clinton, playing William’s and Sonia’s sons Malcolm and Ennis, would be up next.
Broke-ology tells the story of the Kings, a tightly knit Black family that, in a lot of ways, doesn’t really have much wrong with them except that they don’t have anything. Early in the play, Malcolm and Ennis are getting out the dominoes when one decides to explain the neologism to the other. “Broke-ology,” Ennis explains, is “the study of being broke.” Malcolm, an actual scientist, is skeptical. “Just because you want something to be a science, doesn’t make it a science,” he says. But Ennis is undaunted. He has theories, hypotheses, equations. “Fried bologna times sidewalk sales plus minimum wage minus health insurance/adequate education equals brokeness times being alive,” explaining that he thought of it in the bathroom and wrote it on a piece of toilet paper.
“You are a fool,” Malcolm says.
“Ain’t nothing changed,” Ennis says.
Broke-ology departs from the expectations of a usual drama in that the tension doesn’t derive from conflict between the characters. It’s a story about characters holding together and struggling against their circumstances: in this case, there’s not enough money to solve their problems, a situation becoming increasingly acute when — with Sonia already conspicuously absent from the picture — William is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and it falls to Ennis and Malcolm to take care of him as he worsens.
When he was younger, father William was proud to work 40 hours a week at a regular job and 20 more on the weekend to help make further ends meet as a heater and air conditioner repairman. “I wouldn’t charge anybody more than they could pay, because that ain’t right,” he says. But it wasn’t enough to improve their lot in life. Mother Sonia had dreams of being an artist, but never had the money to realize those dreams. Ennis works at a fast-food place and struggles even more to pay the bills for his partner and new baby than his father did. Malcolm, at first glance, could be thought of as the one who “got out.” He went to college and on to graduate school, and when we meet him as an adult, he has an advanced degree and is looking at a couple possibilities for steady work in research or academia. But his sense of duty as a caretaker to his father, and his bond with Ennis, complicate those plans.
The above scenario might make it sound like Broke-ology is a heavy drama. It isn’t. Line by line, what comes to the fore isn’t the family members’ struggles, but just how close they are, and how much they can rely on one another to get through their hardships. We see the three men play dominoes with each other with the practiced hands of people who have been doing it their entire lives, and they have a deep and easy camaraderie that can’t be shaken even when they have to have hard conversations, especially as William’s condition worsens. We see the brothers reach back into a childhood of youthful escapades in order to shore up their adult relationship as it’s tested by their circumstances. And we see how William is still connected to Sonia, even after many years have passed. The quiet sadness of Broke-ology doesn’t lie in human failure, but in the slow turning of the screw of poverty, and we see how William, Ennis, and Malcolm all take care of each other and make the best they can of their narrowing choices, even when there are only a few left.
Broke-ology, Singleton explained, explores “some issues that we have never really tackled with our previous productions. At its emotional heart, the play is about “what it’s like for families who are caretakers, of their parents, of other loved ones, the dilemmas and decisions that come with that.” And CCT has looked at “Black male acceptance, brotherhood, love, and relationships previously, but not in this form, where there is a family of men, whose mother is no longer with them, having to deal with the ups and downs of life as a three-male household.”
“There’s never enough expressions of love between males” in popular culture, Singleton continued. “We rarely see it in entertainment, between Black men, and this play does that very well, where they are vulnerable with each other, they love one another, and they support each other through thick and thin. And it’s always important to us in our work to present plays where people, particularly families, don’t completely fall out with each other over the different issues…. They always are family, and that never gets in the way of anything.”
Putting on Broke-ology now also feels “timely” in its depiction of financial insecurity amid “the rising costs of health care,” Singleton said. There is “taking care of yourself” and those around you, along with the problems of “jobs and careers and schooling and all these other things that are deeply affected when you have limited income.”
Singleton also noted that Collective Consciousness is, at the moment, also no stranger to financial struggle. Like many theaters, he said, “we have not returned to the numbers and the momentum that we had pre-pandemic.” He has seen the hit in both audience attendance and in funding for the theater and the arts in general. “Our foundation support was the best that it had been going into the pandemic,” Singleton said. Since then, especially with federal funding cuts, direct arts funding has “completely dried up or it’s much less than it was.” Other foundations have shifted their priorities to basic needs, leaving even less for arts support. Similarly, before the pandemic “our attendance numbers were the highest they had been,” and then “I just felt like it all halted.” CCT’s 2023 production of Barbecue sold out, but “our last two productions have not sold well at all.”
CCT knows other theaters are feeling the pinch as well. “Nobody is where they were pre-pandemic,” he said. “And I think sometimes the public, when they come to a show, they see it’s a good show, they see you have good actors, sometimes there’s an assumption because you are continually still producing that you’re doing really well, you’re thriving.” And “artistically we are thriving,” he added. “Our work is critically acclaimed, we’ve still got fantastic artists who are some of the best in Connecticut.” But the audiences have not returned in the numbers CCT needs.
“We need people to come to this production,” or “if they can’t come to the production, to think about purchasing a ticket for another person, purchasing a pay-it-forward ticket, but looking at a way that they can support this season,” Singleton said. “It’s important now more than ever for people to support their local arts scene, whether it be theater, dance, visual art, the performing arts — more than ever. We know what the arts do, and beneficial they can be for the individual, for society, and for the community.”
Collective Consciousness Theatre’s production of Broke-ology runs at Bregamos Community Theatre from Nov. 13 to Nov. 23. Visit CCT’s website for tickets and more information.
