In each person’s life, there are decisions that change everything. In 1896, Irish farm-girl Katie Henry got on a ship to America to make a new life. In 1983, Nikki Owen took a job as a paramedic in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. Katie Henry went on to found St. Clare’s hospital during the depths of the Depression. Nikki Owen worked on the St. Clare’s ambulance for 25 years, through the AIDS crisis, the years of crack and homelessness, and the attack on the World Trade Center. Broke is the story of those women, and the people who made St. Clare’s the eternally strange, always broke, but unfailingly kindhearted hospital that it was. In essence, the piece is a love song to a hospital that attended to the poor when other hospitals would not. We see its rise through the 20th century and its demise into rubble and, finally,  condos, in the 2000s.  Nikki and Katie are two women separated by a hundred years, but joined by their struggle to find their place in a world commandeered by men.