Steve Shapiro

If one could determine the makeup of a theatrical production by its look, after both the extravagant and flamboyant sets of “Into the Woods” and “Around the World in 80 Days,” and the spare staging of “Palomino,” the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s set for its new drama, “Broke-ology” is, in the best sense, shabby.

This production, by an illuminating new playwright, Nathan Louis Jackson (born in Kansas City, Kansas, where his fiercely-felt domestic drama is set), reproduces a house residing in the Quindaro district: inside, an old air-conditioning unit is taped to one window, old board games fill a seen-better-days cabinet, and in the center is a sagging sofa; outside, dogs bark and the neighborhood is an unkempt collection of weeds and thugs.

The design by Meghan Raham includes a screen door, which gets a lot of action, always slamming—after a while, one waits for the noise. It turns out to be the sound of a family shutting out its possibilities.

“Broke-ology” (which opened February 26 at the downtown Copaken Stage, and runs through March 21) comes to The Rep backwards: it has already had its New York début, first at the Williamsburg Theatre Festival and then at Lincoln Center, in 2009, where the reviewers were well-inclined to view Jackson’s play as neither another black-family-in-distress nor a for-African-Americans-only, in the polarizing way the film director Spike Lee has occasionally laid down the law for black art works. Indeed, just as Bartlett Sher expertly directed the August Wilson play “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” last year on Broadway, despite some skeptics in the audience, so Kyle Hatley, who is also white, has directed this production without blandifying the playwright’s intent.

After all, Jackson’s tale of familial tug-of-war is not explicitly of one race or class or even geography. From Arthur Miller’s post-Second-World-War drama of family secrets “All My Sons” to Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical dysfunctional epic “A Long Day’s Journey into Night” to Sam Shepard’s caustic comic “Buried Child,” the family has represented the ideal metaphor for tracing America’s innate contradictions between putting either one’s family or oneself first.

The play opens with William King (the dignified David Emerson Toney), a repairman, coming home to his beloved wife, Sophie (Shamika Cotton), who is pregnant with the couple’s first child. Their brief exchange both sets up their enduring love for each other and suggests William’s angst when, as the opening scene fades and we resume fifteen years later, William and Sophie’s two grown sons, Ennis (Postell Pringle) and Malcolm (Larry Powell), are all who are there for him because Sophie has been long dead.

Malcom is home after his college graduation in Connecticut that no one in the family attended; William apologizes, but Malcolm says without regret that he came to his high school graduation. Malcolm, who has a job for the summer at the EPA, retains his fraternal game of one-upsmanship with Ennis, the elder, who mocks him for Malcolm’s collegiate big words.

If Malcolm is devising his future, Ennis has already taken steps to ensure his will be an armful: his white girlfriend, Tammy, is pregnant, so that he has taken double shifts as a line cook at a Stroud’s-like diner. Between his demanding boss and his expectant (in more ways than he likes) girlfriend, Ennis is a bit of a tea kettle whose steam is whistling but he cannot decide whether to turn it off or ignore it, the way his cell phone goes off every few minutes.

The brothers love each other; but years of being apart also turned them into strangers of a sort, especially when their father’s illness—a ratcheting up of Multiple Sclerosis, causing him to wear an eye patch and need daily shots—highlights each son’s attitude toward family and responsibility.

Jackson is a brisk writer, with a natural air for characters and a melodious ear for natural dialogue. For someone so young, he fully integrates the feelings of remorse and regret into William’s character as he begins to slip away (periodically, Sophie in her beautiful green dress appears at the top of the stairs in shadows or wanders around the stage, engaging a delirious William in nostalgic conversations about how things could be, still).

Like Zadie Smith, whose ability to immerse herself in the lives of young and old men, black and white, makes her fiction so lively, Nathan Jackson has poured one man’s past into his present circumstances. When the crucial debate finally arrives—what to do with Pops; and should Malcolm stay to help, when he wants to return to Connecticut as his way out of his failing family life in KCK—the playwright, if at times he falls into the convention of depicting young men posturing with profanity and butting heads, never forgets to make the father a genuine father figure to look up to and lead.

The title refers to a comic monologue early on, when Ennis announces he has thought through a new science, Broke-ology, that is, living while being broke. While Ennis’s brokenness is evident financially in all the baby things he feels trapped into buying, it is his brother’s emotional and their father’s physical / psychological broken states that form the play’s core. Jackson’s ebb and flow of dialogue, even when the plot is on a familiar path of confrontation and sadness, shows thinking, rather than simply feeling. The few sentimental touches are unobtrusive; for a naturalistic play, we would be cheated without some wellspring of feeling. (What was Arthur Miller but overspent feeling?)

As smooth as the writing, the acting reinforces the playwright’s vision of struggling with respect. The three male actors never throw themselves around or embellish the playwright’s themes with actor’s mannerisms.

Much of the production’s best work comes with the three sitting around a table, playing Dominoes; their ease in slipping from anger to humor to love and even to surprise recalls that theater is, indeed, real, even if the life depicted is scripted and rehearsed. At the play’s end, the audience has slipped from one emotion to another, yet left with a sense that some tragedies are for the best. (Aren’t they?)