Martyna Majok’s Pulitzer Prize winning drama has fortunately been given a chance to achieve greater exposure after its limited 2017 run at Off-Broadway’s Manhattan Theatre Club. Currently playing on Broadway in a partially recast version produced by the same organization, Cost of Living has lost none of its emotional power and poignancy. Although dealing largely with the difficulties of two physically disabled characters, this is really a beautifully observed play about the human condition in general.
The playwright’s bracing lack of sentimentality or political correctness in dealing with her sensitive subject matter is vividly illustrated in an early scene in which a young female caregiver, Jess (Kara Young, recent Tony nominee for Clyde’s) first meets her prospective new employer, an obviously wealthy Princeton graduate student, John (Gregg Mozgala), who is confined to a wheelchair due to cerebral palsy. When she admits that she’s never before worked with the “differently-abled,” John reacts in irritated fashion.
“Don’t call it that,” he snaps. “It’s fucking retarded.”
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Those characters’ stories are intertwined with those of Eddie (David Zayas, Showtime’s Dexter), an unemployed truck driver who hasn’t been able to work because of a DUI conviction, and his sharp-tongued ex-wife Ani (Katy Sullivan, who won a Theatre World Award for the previous production), a quadriplegic as a result of a car accident. We’re introduced to Eddie in the play’s opening scene, in which he delivers a monologue revealing that Ani has died and that he’s been receiving mysterious text messages apparently sent from her phone.
That most of the rest of the play consists of flashbacks reveal its lack of structural cohesiveness, no doubt because it was written in stages, expanded from a previously produced one-act. The chronology can be confusing, and the final scene feels a bit tacked-on. But those are minor flaws considering that its dialogue and situations resonate with emotional truth about loneliness, financial desperation and the vulnerability of disabled people forced to rely on others to assist them with basic human needs. The last element is strikingly illustrated in intimate scenes in which Jess bathes John, each revealing no self-consciousness about his nudity, and Eddie attends to Ani in the bathtub. The latter episode also provides the play’s most harrowing moment, one that elicits gasps from the audience.
Under the astute direction of Jo Bonney, the production remains largely the same as it was Off-Broadway. Mozgala, who in real life has a less severe form of cerebral palsy than his character’s, and Sullivan, a bilateral above-the-knee amputee and record-setting Paralympic athlete, superbly repeat their roles, delivering bracing portrayals that never once beg for sympathy. When John reveals himself to be self-absorbedly insensitive to Jess’ feelings and Ani treats her ex-husband with brusque irritation even as he lovingly tends to her, it reminds us that their characters are defined by more than their physical challenges. The two newcomers to the cast are equally affecting; Zayas, who effortlessly projects decency, proves deeply sympathetic as a man who becomes haunted by the loss of everything that was important to him, while the endlessly charismatic Young delivers a live-wire portrayal that mines laughs and pathos in equal measure. Each of these performer’s sterling work should be well remembered at Tony Award time.
Cost of Living opened October 3, 2022, at Samuel J. Friedman Theatre and runs through November 6. Tickets and information: manhattantheatreclub.com
