For ‘Cost of Living’ playwright Martyna Majok, the struggle to survive and connect isn’t fiction
A decade ago, Martyna Majok was at a difficult crossroads when the seeds of her acclaimed drama “Cost of Living” began sprouting. A Polish immigrant who grew up in New Jersey, Majok had moved to New York to pursue her dream of becoming a playwright, but she was struggling to make ends meet. In the second of the 13 apartments she would sublet, she dealt with that fear of every New Yorker — bedbugs. “I got promptly, properly hazed by New York City,” she says, with a mordant laugh. “Like, you want to follow your dreams? Cool. Not in this place.”
Then she got fired from her bartending job. Returning home on that wintry January night, she began thinking about how much she missed her grandfather, who had died two years before. “I’d been running around just trying to survive, and it was the first time I had to look at everything because I had no job,” she says. As she sat at a table in her sublet, the voice of Eddie Torres, a grief-stricken, unemployed truck driver mourning his deceased, estranged wife, Ani, came into Majok’s head. Out poured the opening monologue of “Cost of Living,” when Eddie reveals his guilt, regret, and longing for Ani.
Eventually, Majok wove that story into the tale of two other lost souls — a PhD student with cerebral palsy and his caregiver, inspired by Majok’s own experience working as a personal care aide for two disabled men.
The resulting play, “Cost of Living,” premiered at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2016, won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, and landed on Broadway in 2022, capturing a Tony Award nomination for best play. SpeakEasy Stage Company is presenting its Boston premiere at the Roberts Studio Theatre, beginning Friday.
The drama, she says, emerged from “a year of a lot of vulnerability, bad breaks, grief, and wondering: What is this all for? Is there anybody out there? [I was] just feeling very alone and yearning for something to connect me to something real, to other people. I kept hoping I would see the ghost of my family member so that I would know that there was something beyond. Hoping for magic and some sort of miracle was the headspace I was in, and this play came out of that time.”
In the play, we see the journey of Eddie (Lewis D. Wheeler) and Ani (Stephanie Gould), a paraplegic who had shattered her spine in an accident after she and Eddie had split up. Saddled with guilt, Eddie tries to help the acerbic Ani in her struggles and recovery. Meanwhile, wealthy student John (Sean Leviashvili) and his caregiver, Jess (Gina Fonseca), a first-generation immigrant and Princeton graduate who’s working two jobs, navigate a tender yet fraught dynamic.
At the time in her life when she wrote the play, Majok says she was coming down from a period when she had “felt full of promise” after graduating from the University of Chicago and then getting her masters at the Yale School of Drama. “I hoped that I’d done this work and maybe somebody might be willing to listen to what I have to say. Then I moved into the world and had to confront my financial vulnerability as an artist, as a human.”
Indeed, Majok’s other plays, including “Ironbound,” “Sanctuary City,” and “Queens,” are populated by people living on the margins of society — immigrants, low-income and working-class folks, people with disabilities, and women struggling with caretaking roles.
“All of the characters in this play are carrying some kind of feeling of precarity and yearning for safety,” Majok says of “Cost of Living.” “And I feel like if there’s a concept I keep returning to as a writer, it’s characters endeavoring towards safety.”
For Alex Lonati, who’s directing the play at SpeakEasy, the story is not only about “how you need other people, but also how we kind of need to be needed. All four of these characters are supremely lonely and are just reaching out that hand. So we see some beautiful moments of connection and misconnection.”
Majok has stipulated that the disabled characters must be played by disabled actors, which had given the play a reputation as being difficult to produce. But after its Pulitzer and the play’s arrival on Broadway, more productions of “Cost of Living” are being staged. Still, Majok has had some theaters reach out to ask if casting disabled actors was truly a requirement. To assist, she gave them lists of potential candidates.
There was never a question, Lonati says, that SpeakEasy was going to cast actors with disabilities in the roles of Ani and John. “There aren’t a lot of opportunities for actors from the disabled community. That’s why this play is so important,” she says. The characters, she adds, are three-dimensional people with flaws and foibles. “They don’t fall into the media tropes we often see. These are complicated and passionate people, sometimes angry, sometimes smug, funny, and flirty. They’re not martyrs.”
Gould and Leviashvili both have cerebral palsy. Leviashvili created and starred in a short film, “Limp,” that depicts the travails of dating with a disability. Gould, who grew up in Melrose and has appeared on “Orange Is the New Black,” created and performed a solo show, “Walk With Me,” about her experience living with cerebral palsy and learning to walk again after major surgery when she was 13.
“I relate to Ani so much because I know what it’s like to be frustrated physically, to not be able to do something. I have a stiffness to my body that’s just naturally occurring, so when Ani is stiff, I can use that. There are many moments in the show where I’m calling back to my youth when I was learning to do certain things again or learning to do things for the first time.”
Still, Gould recalls a mentor insisting that her cerebral palsy would become “an asset” one day. “I’m finding as I get older that my disability isn’t necessarily a hindrance, but something I should be proud of and don’t need to hide. I did a lot of hiding when I was growing up because it was painful, emotionally and physically.
“Now I’m more confident, and I want to show people that disabled actors are just as worthy of stage time as ‘normal’ actors, that we have just as much talent as everybody else and we can use whatever we have to our advantage.”