The characters of Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living, making its Broadway debut after acclaimed runs off Broadway and in London want so much: love, understanding, dignity, care, a safe and warm place to sleep away the night. Here is one thing that doesn’t make the list – your pity.
Majok’s Pulitzer-winning play (or two plays, really, with a valedictory intersection) is set in contemporary New Jersey and told mostly in flashback, though its structure doesn’t crystallize until its last scene. Under Jo Bonney’s clear-eyed, unfussed direction, one half of its turntable stage is occupied by Eddie (David Zayas), a truck driver who lost his license in a DUI, and his estranged wife Ani (Katy Sullivan), who lost the use of her limbs in a recent unrelated accident. On the other are Jess (Kara Young), a Princeton grad working several survival jobs, and John (Gregg Mozgala), a PhD candidate with cerebral palsy who hires her to wash and dress him.
That John and Ani live with disabilities – one congenital, one acquired in midlife – place them on the margins of American society and make them Broadway rarities. (That they are played by actors with disabilities is a phenomenon even rarer.) But Majok, who has worked as a health aide, neither sanctifies nor fetishizes these characters and their bodies.
In an early scene, Jess applies to work with John and struggles to find language to describe him. “I’ve never worked with the differently abled,” she says.
John tells her not to use those words and she worries that she has offended him, that she has used the wrong term. Why, she asks.
“It’s fucking retarded,” is John’s answer, which comes with a snap like a wet towel. Because Majok (Ironbound, Sanctuary City) doesn’t sentimentalize either. Ani and John are allowed to be as spiky and insensitive as anyone.
Majok is an ultra-realist, somewhat in the manner of Stephen Adly Giurgis though less inclined to folk poetry. Her subject here is how we care for ourselves (not too well, usually) and how we care for each other. This care has its limits and inadequacies, but as the American social safety net is woven with some very wide mesh, there are few other alternatives. While Jess and Eddie have typical bodies, they are very much on the margins, too – Eddie with no job and Jess with too many. Majok has empathy for all of them, but not an ounce of condescension, which is more extraordinary than it should be in the American theater.
There are a few infelicities here, like the present-past-present structure, which feels incidental rather than determined, and an overlong opening monologue, delivered by Zayas with both muscle and sensitivity, but lacking the dynamism of the two-person scenes. Majok’s writing has its own blunt lyricism, but with Bonney as guide, the play mostly succeeds as a showcase for its actors. Zayas, a veteran of the Labyrinth Theater Company, excels at playing tough guys with soft underbellies. Young, an off-Broadway treasure, is a tiny woman with seemingly effortless access to a deep water well of emotion. It’s not until the curtain call that Mozgala and Sullivan display the full range of their talents. Mozgala’s cerebral palsy is much less severe than John’s, so every spasm and slurred syllable is all technique, which Mozgala layers beneath John’s privilege and yearning and alienation. Sullivan, a Paralympian born without lower legs, plays a quadriplegic, without ever denying Ani her pride and hurt and vicious humor.
Generous even in its anger, Cost of Living is an act of service toward its characters, its actors and its audience, too, enlarging the vision of what is possible in a Broadway theater and who is welcome here.
