Martyna Majok’s play is staged beautifully in a joint production by Curious and Phamaly theatre companies
At the top of Cost of Living, out-of-work truck driver Eddie (Isaiah Kelley) sits alone at a bar in Brooklyn addressing an unseen man he hopes will listen to his story. For a good five minutes, Kelley holds the audience as he shares details about his wreck of a life: his wife dead, a DUI killing his driving career, and a ghostly text from his wife’s phone number that led him from his home in Jersey to Williamsburg where he sips seltzer waiting for … something.
Eddie presents it all as a comic tale of sorts, his dialogue interspersed with more F-bombs than a Pod Save America episode. It’s a striking performance, giving the audience instant familiarity and sympathy for the character without knowing much about him beyond his travails.
Martyna Majok’s 2018 Pulitzer winner is currently up at Denver’s Curious Theatre in a joint production with Phamaly Theatre — a company dedicated to providing opportunities for theatre artists with disabilities. Directed by Phamaly’s Artistic Director Ben Raanan, Cost of Living is a beautiful character study about four people isolated in different ways and trying to make meaningful connections. And while two of them are in wheelchairs, Majok’s script doesn’t elevate that any more than the psychological wounds of the two abled characters.
After Kelley’s opener, told from the future, we shift to the first meeting between John (Jamie Rizzo) and Jess (Valentina Fittipaldi). She’s a worked-to-death, penniless bartender and he’s a wealthy Princeton academic in a wheelchair looking for a new aide. Their initial contact is that of two highly suspicious people, used to being ill-treated and doing their best to feel out the other for signs of potential trouble.
There’s enough material between these two to have their own play, and watching the two actors work these characters is highly enjoyable. (Indeed, Majok’s original one-act was just about John and Jess; the second couple was added later.) Rizzo is reprising the role of John after playing it at Milwaukee’s Renaissance Theatreworks in 2023 (also a co-production with Phamaly). Living with spina bifida himself, Rizzo plays a character with cerebral palsy. His halting vocal patterns have the interesting effect of causing us to pay very close attention to what he’s saying, while accentuating the sly humor and sometimes bristly personality of the character.
She may be soaking wet from the rain and desperate for money, but Jess is no pushover. As disparate as their lives are, they manage to break through fairly quickly by deploying one very powerful tool: truth. And when John describes some of the tasks she’ll be asked to perform — like helping him shower — we get the sense that the world-weary Jess sees scrubbing his pits no differently than washing glasses at the bar.
I loved this brief exchange where John sets her straight on a few things:
Jess: I never worked with the, differently abled —
John: Don’t do that, don’t call it that
Jess: So how do I refer to you
John: Are you planning on talking about me?
Jess: No
John: Why not? I’m very interesting
Isaiah Kelley and Colby Stocking | Photo: Michael Ensminger Photography
Eddie and Ani
Recently separated from his wife, Ani, Eddie finds himself still in her orbit as he tries to help her live life as a quadriplegic. It’s not made clear who was at fault in the car crash that caused it, but Eddie seems to carry plenty of guilt about it. Even as he embarks on a new relationship, he’s back at their old apartment enduring her withering reprobation.
The fiercely independent Ani is played with appropriate acidity by Ann Colby Stocking. It’s no small task to fill out a character with very little body movement, and Stocking is up to the challenge as both a woman scorned and physically devastated. The interplay between her and John is fascinating — like two magnets simultaneously attracted and repulsed by the other.
As the play’s title suggests, money and its imbalances are also at the root of these stories. There’s no way to explain why John is smart and wealthy while Jess is living in her car while managing multiple jobs. For Ani and Eddie, the cost of both their divorce and her disability is always top of mind.
Under Raanan’s direction with this excellent cast, Cost of Living unfolds as a slice of life in some scenes. But it also has a larger arc where things like poverty, tragedy, disability and even a DUI that costs Eddie his CDL are omnipresent storm clouds that keep them down. There may be a slight ray of sunshine at the end as the paths of Eddie and Jess intersect, but Majok’s script doesn’t venture past a faint possibility.
The old church that houses Curious Theatre isn’t exactly a model of ADA compliance, but set designer Nicholas Renaud has created a simple yet functional space that gets the job done. The production, notably, has a lot of onstage water action — a working shower in John’s apartment and a full tub for a scene with Ani and Eddie. As challenging as that may be, both are needed to underscore the physicality between the characters: those who help and those who need help. With Jess and John particularly, the story illustrates the transactional nature of the relationship while the close physicality can’t help but draw them closer, human to human.
It’s a poignant message told in a unique and compelling manner that makes this Curious-Phamaly production something quite special. Not a play about physical disabilities; a play about all disabilities and how people can still enable one another despite it all.
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