Cost of Living
Opening Night: June 7, 2017
Closing: July 16, 2017
Theater: MTC - Stage 1
Directed by Obie Award winner Jo Bonney, this achingly human and surprisingly funny play from exciting new voice Martyna Majok is about the forces that bring people together, the realities of facing the world with physical disabilities and how deeply we all need each other. Truck driver Eddie is struggling to rebuild a relationship with his estranged wife Ani and Jess is trying to navigate the day-to-day with John, her new boss in a job that she desperately needs. People are hard.
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June 7, 2017
John has cerebral palsy. Ani is a double above-the-knee amputee. Neither has patience for tactful solicitude or delicate terminology. John warns Jess, the caregiver he hires to dress and shower him, that the term “differently abled” is “retarded.” Most of what Ani tells her estranged husband, Eddie, who wants to help her with ideas he’s gleaned from the internet, cannot be printed here.
So the first of many great things about Martyna Majok’s “Cost of Living,” which opened on Wednesday in a gripping Manhattan Theatre Club production, is the way it slams the door on uplifting stereotypes. John is no sympathy case but a rich, bratty grad student at Princeton, protective of his privilege. Ani is a hilariously foul-mouthed North Jersey terror: a cat, as Ms. Majok puts it, that refuses to be petted. You get the feeling she was like that long before the accident that made her quadriplegic and that going soft now would be, well, crippling.
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