Theater Review—

Strong Cast & Fine Direction Bring ‘Broke-Ology’ To Life

By Julie Stern

HARTFORD — “Life is what happens while you are making other plans” pretty much captures the theme of Nathan Louis Jackson’s deeply moving, beautifully acted comic-drama Broke-Ology, on stage at Hartford’s Theater Works until October 24.

When the play opens, William King, a proud and powerful appliance repairman, and his loving and very pregnant wife Sonia are visualizing the future. Her hopes and expectations are clear: we’ll still be married, we’ll have our health, we will have moved to a better neighborhood where our children can play safely outside, they’ll go to good schools, and grow into people we can be proud of.  William beams. He’ll work extra hard, they’ll save their money, and in five years they’ll buy their dream house…

Right after that hopeful opening scene, the time leaps forward some 27 years, to show the two King sons, Ennis and Malcolm, sitting in the kitchen of the same old house, having a playful argument. Malcolm, who has just received a master’s degree in environmental science from UConn, is telling his older brother that just because Ennis coined a word with “-ology” at the end, it doesn’t make Broke-ology a science. The fast talking Ennis claims he has invented an idea that will make them rich: that if you put together the conditions of ghetto life — poor education, unemployment, and lack of health care — you get people mired in permanent poverty and this can be made into a science to be studied.

The boys are just jiving. Ennis is poking fun at his highly educated brother, and Malcolm is enjoying it. The first shadows fall when an older and clearly diminished William shambles into the room, wearing an eye patch that his sons have not seen before.  Some painful truths are established.

Sonia has been dead for many years, claimed by cancer when the boys were children. William is suffering from MS which has rendered him unable to work, and is gradually claiming his eyesight, his balance, and his strength. The family never did get to move to Sonia’s dream house.

Still there are good things going on here. The love between the three men is clear and palpable. Ennis is married, and about to become a father himself. For lack of an education, he is mired in a fast food job, but he is funny and clever and high spirited.  Malcolm has done so well academically that he has been offered a teaching job at UConn, where he can also work with his professorial mentor, developing programs to rehabilitate ghetto neighborhoods with community gardens and other environmentally meaningful projects.

The problem is, while Malcolm has been away for six years, Ennis has been caring for his father, bringing him food, supervising his medicines, making sure he is all right. Now that he has a child of his own to look after, he feels it is Malcolm’s turn. Rather than go back to the university, he should take a job with the EPA and move back in with William.

Over the course of the summer, while Malcolm must make a decision, all three of them wrestle with the issue of family and responsibility, and the freedom to pursue personal dreams. In the play, this conflict is portrayed with pathos, but also with rich humor and the kind of boisterous high spirited kidding that captures the deep closeness and friendship that can exist between brothers. Whatever mistakes and life-limiting choices Ennis has made, these are indeed the children that Sonia dreamed of.

In scenes of flashback and fantasy, Sonia returns when William is alone, reinforcing the vision of the love they had, and the pain of his loss. In non-financial ways, this family is indeed broken, and yet they really aren’t. There is talk about being stuck —William with a degenerative disease that will eventually deprive him of all freedom and dignity; Ennis in a dead-end job, laboring to support a wife and child; and Malcolm, who wants to avoid getting stuck in the world of the ghetto — but somehow we are left believing that they have the strength to prevail.

Under the fine direction of Tazewell Thompson, the cast of Gina Daniels as Sonia, Frank Caucette as William, Royce Johnson as Ennis and David Pegram as Malcolm, give a poignant, moving, at times hilarious performance. There are some wonderful scenes with a stolen garden gnome named Stubby.

It should be noted that while the Kings are African-American, living in a run-down ghetto neighborhood of Kansas City, but this is not a reworking of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, nor even, as George C. Wolfe satirized it, the Last Mama on the Couch Play. The problems here are universal, not racial, and while money is definitely an issue, exploitation and suppressed anger are not the motivating themes.

(Performances continue until October 24. See the Enjoy Calendar or call 860-527-7838 for details. Please note this production is recommended for ages 16 and up.)