Theatre in Review: Cost of Living (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)

	Katy Sullivan, David Zayas. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Cost of Living is set in Brooklyn and Bayonne, and yet it had me oddly thinking of Margaret Thatcher. Or, maybe, not so oddly: It was Mrs. Thatcher, you will recall, who, infamously, noted, "Who is society? There is no such thing!" It's a proposition that continues to have many admirers -- you know who I mean -- and it is thoroughly refuted by Martyna Majok's drama, which enmeshes four characters in a web of dependencies and intimacies, often clinging to each other for dear life -- usually because no other option exists.

The action runs on parallel tracks that don't converge until the finale. John, a Princeton graduate student with cerebral palsy, hires Jess, a young Afro-Caribbean woman, as his daytime care person. From the get-go, it's a tricky arrangement with built-in power imbalances: John is wealthy, entitled, used to being in charge, and yet he needs assistance with the most basic tasks. Jess, who is nobody's fool, balances two jobs, struggling to pay her bills; "I sleep for fun," she snaps when asked about any leisure pursuits. But she is also cagey, resistant to John's probing questions. She especially doesn't want to talk about the Ivy League degree that hasn't helped her get ahead.

The pair's sparring is smart and spiky, landing just this side of flirtation, and it contrasts starkly with the sequence in which Jess strips John naked and washes him in the shower. It's a remarkably detailed look at the invasions to which he must submit daily, and it is emblematic of their strange standoff -- physically intimate in a clinical way but separated by lines of class and privilege; forced to constantly surrender his privacy, John wants Jess to pay him back in kind.

Even more fraught is the relationship of the working-class couple Ani and John. In the middle of divorce proceedings -- he has wrecked their marriage by falling off the wagon and cheating -- she has crashed her car, shattering her spinal cord. Having lost the bottom halves of her legs, she is partially paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair. Following this tragedy, she and John have drifted into a limbo state, not together but unable to fully separate; he is consumed with guilt, she with self-directed rage.

Ani has come home from the hospital with no clear plan for home care. For the moment, she is getting by, just barely, on Eddie's insurance -- he is a truck driver -- but the clock is running out on that arrangement. Meanwhile, John, who has taken up with another woman, can't stop dropping by, his attentions only further provoking Ani's fury. Then John makes a radical proposal: Wouldn't they save money if he became her primary caretaker?

Having established these two uneasy alliances, Majok fractures them, exposing any number of tough underlying truths: A terrible misunderstanding between John and Jess reveals him as selfish and mistrustful and her as perilously reliant on her situation with him. An accident in the bathtub lays bare how the tough-talking, foul-mouthed Ani is entirely defenseless in even the most ordinary of circumstances; indeed, John has taken on a greater responsibility than he knows. Majok then brings together Eddie and Jess through a chance encounter, leaving open-ended the possibility that these two custodians, finding themselves more alone than ever, may provide each other with crucial, life-giving support.

Working elliptically and with remarkable economy of means, the playwright creates a portrait in miniature of a society that, all too often, leaves the poor, disabled, and psychologically lost to fend for themselves. At the same time, her dialogue crackles with wit and understated feeling. It's a piece that needs extremely special handling, here provided by director Jo Bonney, recreating her 2017 MTC production with three members of the original cast. Gregg Mozgala, who has a less severe form of cerebral palsy, is ideal as John, maintaining a WASP-ish hauteur throughout. (Note how, faintly perturbed that Jess went to Princeton, he one-ups her, adding casually, yet pointedly, that he has moved to New Jersey "from Cambridge.") But an accidental point of physical contact can send him into spasms, unleashing waves of pain and fear that are terrible to witness. As Ani, the flame-haired, tough-talking Katy Sullivan is defiantly self-assertive, her conversation a steady stream of F-bombs and invective, her fury at an insensitive remark giving way to a witch's cackle. And when, Eddie, gently probing her body while bathing her, asks if she feels anything, her one-word denial vibrates with unexpected sorrow.

Compact, terse, highly focused Kara Young, the cast's newcomer, adeptly channels Jess' stonewalling ways and, later, when she begins to confide to John, her pronounced chatterbox qualities. She makes the most of a story about the origins of her name, the result of a sad-yet-farcical misunderstanding between a hospital nurse and her non-English speaking mother. And she subtly reveals Jess' deep sadness at being unable to support her ailing parent. In a speech that arguably constitutes the play's central thesis, she says, "It matters who you are. Family. Connections. If there's gonna be a net when you fall," adding, wistfully, "I was supposed to be the net."

As good as they are, big, bearlike David Zayas's Eddie is the production's alpha male, from the gorgeous opening monologue about his trucking career ("Roads are dark and America's long") to his final, tentative steps toward helping Jess out of a terrible jam. He gives as good as he gets when Eddie and Ani relitigate their marriage. And he does beautifully by Eddie's quietly heartbreaking memory of the parents who splurged on an expensive Christmas present, a Casio keyboard, before realizing they had no money for lessons. ("So I'd pretend to be able to play. I'd put the radio on. Find the station where they play piano. And I'd act like I was playin' that.")

Bonney's tactful, supremely light touch -- she knows the power of her material and lets it speak for itself -- is matched by the production design. Wilson Chin knows how to sketch in a location with a minimum of furnishings -- a single row of backlit liquor bottles stands in for a Brooklyn bar -- while using a turntable to keep the action moving swiftly. Jeff Croiter's lighting frames and isolates the characters with surgical precision while adding to the overall melancholic mood. Jessica Pabst's costumes are highly suitable to each character, especially the dress Jess chooses for what she thinks is a date. Rob Kaplowitz's sound design provides many crucial effects -- rain, a car engine, a classical piece on the radio -- while providing reinforcement for the piano-and-string arrangements of Mikaal Sulaiman's attractive incidental music.

"It's little breaks, y'know?," Jess says, near the end. "The car. Health stuff, no insurance -- that cleans you out fast. Bad luck. Mistakes." She and everyone else in Cost of Living inhabit a society where sliding is too easy for those without plenty of cash and connections. That the characters keep reaching out to help each other is a beautiful thing. That they need so desperately to do so is a judgment on us all. On the above point, at least, Mrs. Thatcher was an idiot. --David Barbour