Julieta Cervantes
What is not said, and the many silences that pepper its structure, are just as important in Martyna Majok’s Pulitzer-winning play, Cost of Living (Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, to October 30), as what is said between its four characters: John (Gregg Mozgala), a graduate student with cerebral palsy, Jess (Kara Young, recently Tony-nominated for Clyde’s), a bartender who becomes his caregiver, Eddie (David Zayas), a nervy unemployed truck driver, and Ani (Katy Sullivan), his quadriplegic ex-wife.
In this excellent Manhattan Theatre Club production, Mozzgala and Sullivan (a U.S. athletic champion, as well as an actor) are reprising their roles on Broadway, having originated them at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2016 and off-Broadway in 2017.
It is Eddie that begins the play sitting in front of us, twinkling lights and a shelf of illuminated bottles behind him, a gruff and blokey fish out of water in a Brooklyn hipster bar. “The shit that happens is not to be understood. That’s from the Bible. The shit that happens to you is Not To Be Understood,” he says. Something tragic has happened, he indicates, so what does he do now.