Fifteen years after its premiere at KC Rep, Broke-ology returns to Kansas City in honor of playwright and Kansas City native Nathan Louis Jackson. A graduate of Washington High School and, later, Juilliard, Jackson debuted Broke-ology while still a student. He went on to a successful career as a playwright and screenwriter, working on shows like S.W.A.T. and the Netflix series Luke Cage, but his life was cut short in 2023 when he passed away unexpectedly. He was 44.
Inspired by Jackson’s upbringing, Broke-ology tells the complex and poignant story of the King family as they navigate hardship in a working class KCK neighborhood. The King brothers are faced with the responsibility of caring for a father debilitated by multiple sclerosis—the same disease Jackson’s father battled.
While Broke-ology explores love, struggle and endurance, its quiet brilliance defies easy categorization. Director Francois Battiste, a close friend of Jackson, shared his thoughts on the play’s lasting impact.
What impression did the script have on you when you first read it? Any great work, any great piece of literature, if you read it at age 17, is going to mean something completely different to you at age 37. So when I first read Broke-ology, I was immediately drawn to the brothers because they were in my age range. I could understand what they were saying and how they were maneuvering through life. I have an older brother. I have already lost a brother to cancer, and my brother and I are now looking at, how do we take care of our aging parents? And that’s what Ennis and Malcolm are going through over the course of the play. That’s sort of where their struggle is. And now that it’s almost 17 years later, it resonates with me—still with the brothers—but also taking into account how a parent feels. So it hits you on different levels as you continually mature with the piece itself. The piece hasn’t changed. The beings change.
Theater critic Robert Feldberg wrote in the The Record of Hackensack, New Jersey, that “Broke-ology is a decidedly imperfect work, but it’s a very promising debut in the big time for a playwright with a rare quality: heart.” What would you say in response to that statement? I try to stay away from criticism. You know, when you say something is imperfect, can you name anything that is perfect? I think he’s right about the heart. I think he’s spot on when it comes to the heart. Because what’s interesting is that Nathan was a young dude writing about very mature topics, and he had the wisdom and intellectual capability to couch it in a way that was not preachy. He had the instinct to write in a way that kept you laughing and made you think a lot later on. To me, that’s the stroke of genius with Broke-ology. When you begin to analyze it—when you begin to peel back the layers of the depth of the subjects he was talking about—that’s where the gold is. The more you excavate Broke-ology, the more you’re coming up with issues that tend to get glossed over in our society. There is no perfect play. There’s nothing in art that is perfect. It’s just perfect to an individual. It’s how you receive the production or how you receive a piece of art that is perfect for you.
Broke-ology premieres at Copaken Stage on Feb. 11 and is recommended for viewers ages 14 and older due to its use of
strong language and racial epithets.
