Welcome to Curtain Call, our mostly queer take on the latest openings on Broadway and beyond.
The Rundown:
When Martyna Majok’s play Cost of Living premiered at Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2016, transferred Off-Broadway a year later, then won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the world spun on a different axis. Empathy was a concept from a far-off land, soon to be catapulted by a global pandemic that crystalized our collective relationship with mortality.
Majok’s play, now appearing on Broadway, is a contemplative and occasionally harsh look at the hands we’ve been dealt and how they’re played. Featuring four Tony-worthy performances, this North Jersey slice-of-life dramedy questions ties that bind and love that endures under circumstances few of us will ever experience.
No Tea, No Shade:
Cost of Living begins with Eddie (David Zayas) drinking seltzer at a hipster bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “The sh*t that happens is not to be understood,” he plainly states before sharing the story of a string of text messages from his estranged dead wife, Ani (Katy Sullivan).
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Through a series of scenes that unfold on Wilson Chun’s revolving set, moodily lit by Jeff Croiter, we come to understand the complexity of Eddie and Ani’s relationship. On the verge of a divorce, she was involved in an accident that left her with a severe incomplete spinal cord injury and now lives as a quadriplegic; their relationship looks like a messy page from a coloring book, forced out of the lines due to guilt, rage, love, lust, and looming health insurance bills.
Across town and several rings up the socioeconomic ladder lives John (Gregg Mozogala), a wealthy Ph.D. student with cerebral palsy looking for private home health care, stating flatly, “I have money. I can basically do anything I want except the things I can’t.”
Jess (Kara Young) accepts the job, adding the responsibilities to her other gigs working late-night shifts at local bars to make ends meet, despite having a degree from the same prestigious university John attends.
Cost of Living delivers an aching and nuanced portrait of disability in America. Yet, much of the play transcends the physical body, empowering the quartet with brevity of language that cuts like a surgeon’s knife. Ani and John, in their respective relationships, refuse to let the discomfort of others tether them.
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Let’s Have a Moment:
Take Me Out soon returns for an encore 17-week engagement along with its scintillating nude shower scene. But Cost of Living offers a very different and much more emotionally intimate look at the power and fragility of the human body.
For John and Jess, caregiver and client move through the almost mechanical affair of showering, with Jess’s slight frame heaving John onto a sliding shower chair to bathe, rinse, and dry him, the playwright indicating, “We watch the entire act. It takes as long as it needs.”
Later, Eddie helps Ani bathe as the couple rehashes their relationship and the complicated circumstances that have brought them back together. “If I weren’t like this right now, would you be here,” she asks. “Yeah. Yes,” he responds. Moments later, a gasp-inducing incident shocks the wistful recollections into reality.
The Last Word:
“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” have been buzzing around Broadway and other industries over the past several years, with mission statements and creative teams overhauled to reflect the diverse range of narratives expressed onstage. Cost of Living not only brings those ideologies to life but does so in a way that centers the lived experience of those living with disabilities through a multi-faceted lens that demands even more representation on Broadway and beyond.
Cost of Living plays at Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre through October 30.
