REVIEW: Emotional Impact of Disability Probed in Pulitzer-Winning Play
Cost of Living is about society’s marginalized people isolated by poverty or disability. It features four excellent performers who fashion fully-functioning characters out of subjects that are anything but functional. The play deeply probes the problems of living with disability, and the loss and the sacrifice that entails. It minutely examines the lives of people who need other people to survive but, in both major and minor ways, turn away from the help they need.
Martyna Majok’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning play runs at the Citadel Theatre through Feb 2.
The play spins two parallel story lines. Eddie (Ashley Wright) is an unemployed New Jersey truck driver, desperately lonely and trying to get back with his ex-wife Ani (Teal Sherer). He’s lost his job and his heart for living.
Wright has been performing on Edmonton stages for decades now – but has seldom been more effective than in this role as the ordinary affable guy who uses humour and decency to fend off some very real demons. His monologue at the beginning is an education in how a single actor, sitting in the middle of a stage, can capture and hold an audience through the magic of words and performance.
Ani is now a paraplegic due to a road accident. Always difficult (and spectacularly foul-mouthed), she has been embittered by the situation she finds herself in. In this character the playwright fiercely upends our easy Hollywood expectations of dependency. Ani resents Eddie for providing her life support, and hates herself even more for needing it – taking cruel satisfaction out of embarrassing him. In Sherer’s remarkable performance you can clearly see her underlying loss, sadness and fury.
The other character in the play also inflicts damage on his caregiver – but in a different way. John (Christopher Imbrosciano ) is a graduate student at Princeton and lives in an imposing apartment – while confined to a wheelchair. He’s rich, smart, thoughtless and condescending. His caregiver is Jess (Bahareh Yaraghi) a subsistence-level bar waitress desperately looking for a better-paying job. The unforgiving John gleefully lets the nervous, stumbling applicant know what she’s in for in her first interview.
John snarls, “To call me differently-abled is fucking retarded.” She’s angry about it but knows she has to keep herself in check.
The caregivers may be able-bodied but they are not whole people either. Imbrosciano, who has cerebral palsy in real life, is a busy professional actor, having had roles in The Good Wife and The Cripple of Inishmaan – as well as understudying the role of John in the original Off-Broadway production of Cost of Living. Sherer is a Vancouver actor-activist who is paraplegic.
Much of the best scenes in the play are made up of intimate moments. Martyna Majok fills them with intense and complicated emotions, calibrated with matter-of-fact sensitivity by director Ashlie Corcoran. At one point Eddie is giving Ani a bath and struggles to find out how much she can still feel by pretending to play the piano on her skin. At a similar point in the other story, Jess gives a naked John a shower. The dynamic between the two is compelling.
There is a great sense of authenticity to all this – the deepest foundation of the relationships collide in a murky but universal world of fear and disconnection. This is not a play about disabilities but about disabilities that are connected to real people. The fear and frustration between the couples begins to dissipate as we perceive their eager need for some kind of human communion. John pleads with his caregiver, who has been treating him as if he is his “disability.”
“Why can’t we just have a human conversation?”
When Ani asks her ex-husband why he just doesn’t go away, he replies, “I’m here…”
“But…” she protests, and he answers again simply, “I’m here.”
It’s a story that could easily descend into the mawkish – but the canny playwright never allows that to happen. Self pity is not an asset to Majok – or this superior production and the ending is certainly not Hallmark.
This spare intermission-less 100 minute show is often quiet and thoughtful – but also packed with considerable emotional fireworks. There is anger and awkwardness here but also resilience and an unquenchable spark of life.
Photos by David Cooper
