First, a moment of appreciation and celebration: Two years ago, there wasn’t a blessed thing on Broadway. Now, within a matter of weeks, four Pulitzer Prize–winning plays will mark their opening nights: Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living, August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog. A fifth, Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Between Riverside and Crazy, will arrive on Broadway later this season. In a time when producers are scrambling to think of ways to bring new, younger, and uninitiated audiences to the theater, how encouraging is it that their solution isn’t big, brassy musical revivals or more screen-to-stage adaptations, but rather American plays?
And these plays aren’t exactly all sunshine and lollipops. Majok’s Cost of Living—which just opened at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Friedman Theatre—is an unadorned, unsympathetic, bleakly and blackly comic portrait of four people struggling to form various kinds of human connection: handsome Princeton grad student John (Gregg Mozgala), who has cerebral palsy, and his bartender-by-night caretaker, Jess (Kara Young, a 2022 Tony nominee for Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s); whip-smart Ani (the fabulously funny Katy Sullivan), a recent double amputee, and her well-meaning ne’er-do-well ex-hubby, Eddie (David Zayas).
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
The ever-versatile Young, who this summer made a splash as Viola in the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s terrific outdoor Twelfth Night, proves an excellent comic sparring partner for Mozgala, who revels in his character’s caustic wit. (And, it must be said, in his unimpeachable sense of style. That aubergine cashmere sweater!) Both Young and Zayas are new to Cost of Living—Mozgala and Sullivan played their parts in the 2017 MTC off-Broadway production, and in the play’s 2016 premiere at the Williamstown Theatre Festival—yet their roles feel lived-in; there’s a natural, easy, even electric chemistry on display. At one point, Eddie is helping give Ani a bath, and he mimes playing a classical piano piece on her arm. Chemistry.
Zayas—who you might recognize from Labyrinth Theater Co. productions such as Jesus Hopped the A Train, In Arabia We’d All Be Kings, and Our Lady of 121st Street—has perhaps the toughest role. He’s charged with setting the scene, if you will, with a lengthy speech to start the show: an extended rumination on and reminiscence of Ani. “I’ve done nothin but love the fuck outta this woman for two decades and a year almost.” A blue-collar Bayonne guy in a hipster Brooklyn bar, completely unmoored and swimming in a sense of loss, the former truck driver is drowning his sorrows in seltzer and spilling his proverbial guts to an unseen stranger. “We’re all of us, in motels, on the road to somewhere we ain’t at yet and that makes us feel feelings. Roads are dark and America’s long.” (Note the line of glass liquor bottles on the bar, gleaming like a New York City skyline—a chic, subtle touch by set designer Wilson Chin.) At that moment, we don’t know where the play is going—like Eddie, we’re on the road to somewhere—but he’s pulled us in via Majok’s lyrical, almost magical monologue.
After that, we’ll follow these beautiful, messy characters just about anywhere…even to a slightly unbelievable head-scratcher of a final scene. But Eddie said it best: “The shit that happens is not to be understood.” I suspect that is what we will remember of Cost of Living 20 years from now. “The shit that happens to you is Not To Be Understood.”
Cost of Living opened October 3, 2022, at the Friedman Theatre runs through November 6. Tickets and information: manhattantheatreclub.com
