Review of Cost of Living, a play by Martyna Majok

 

Cost of Living

Review of Cost of Living, a play by Martyna Majok

Speak Easy Stage, at the Calderwood Pavilion through March 30, 2024

By Andy Hoffman

Cost of Living, which won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and received a Tony nomination for Best Play in 2023, has its Boston premiere at Calderwood Pavilion in a production of the Speak Easy Stage. The play focuses on Eddie, an out-of-work truck driver, who opens the production with an entertaining monologue. We’re in a bar and Eddie is making conversation with a fellow patron. He’s not drinking – he’s sober and acknowledges he shouldn’t sit in bars – and has promised himself to avoid doom-and-gloom conversation. Whenever he slips into dark talk, he buys his neighbor a drink as a punishment for telling sad tales. He has plenty of tragedy to talk about: his beloved wife, Ani, has died; in her absence, he texts her old phone, as he used to do when driving long-haul routes; and recently he’s been hearing back from the person who has gotten Ani’s old number. He has comes to the bar because the new owner of the number invited him to meet in Brooklyn, far from his home in New Jersey. He’s so desperately lonely that he takes the chance, but his texting buddy has stood him up.

After the monologue, the play takes us months into the past. We meet Ani and learn the truth about their relationship, which had foundered and led to separation. Then, Ani had a car accident and now is quadriplegic. Eddie feels responsible for Ani’s terrible fortune and offers to care for her, wanting to win Ani back, even in her broken state.

In a parallel story, we meet Jess, who hopes to become an aide to John, a PhD student in Political Science at Princeton, wheelchair bound by cerebral palsy. She tells John she graduate from Princeton herself, but is now working at bars and hoping for better by helping John shave, shower, and dress every day. In spite of John’s misgivings, he hires Jess, and the two reach a kind of rapport based on the fundamental intimacy of personal care. Whether intentionally or not, John leads Jess to believe that something romantic might happen between them, but John only has in mind Jess’ help in dressing him for a date with someone else. Jess walks out.

Cost of Living bravely takes on some theatrical taboos, most straightforwardly placing characters in wheelchairs onstage. The audience must confront its own possibly unplumbed prejudices about disabilities. We rarely get to see the sorrows and victories of people like John and Ani portrayed on stage, and the play does it with humor and compassion.

Throughout Cost of Living, the characters mislead one another and mislead the audience about the essential truths of their lives, so we are also tasked with assessing the truth of what the characters tell us, particularly in the case of Eddie’s opening monologue, which reveals a very slanted portrait of his marriage. We sympathize with him, but as we meet Ani and see their relationship in its full complexity, our sympathies shift. Yes, his life unfolds tragically, but he has earned a significant share of his tragedy. We also begin to doubt everything we have learned about Jess, including the education she seems so proud of. The play reaches its end one snowy night when Eddie and Jess meet: she’s freezing in her car near Eddie’s house after Eddie has returned from his ill-considered trip to the bar where he delivered his opening monologue. Only then does the audience begin to grasp the complex references of the play’s title.

The playwright, Martyna Majok, has stipulated that Ani and John must be played by actors coping with disabilities, which has made Cost of Living difficult to produce. SpeakEasy cast Stephanie Gould and Sean Leviashvili, both of whom live with cerebral palsy; they carry their challenging roles with fundamental sympathy. Lewis D. Wheeler, a veteran of Boston area stages, carries the play as Eddie. Majok has lived much of what Jess has experienced, occupying the margins of America society as an immigrant, working whatever jobs she could until she achieved some notoriety through her chosen art. This production, on an efficient set in the small Roberts Studio Theatre, runs an hour and forty-five minutes with no intermission. I felt that the production could have cut a few of those minutes, particularly during the two bathing scenes. They importantly establish the intimate connections between the characters, but they feel prolonged, especially in a play that has so few moments of lightness. Still, Cost of Living is excellent theater, challenging the audience to place its sympathies in unreliable characters doing the best they can with the lousy hands they’ve been dealt.