BROADWAY REVIEW: Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘Cost of Living’ explores the power struggles in unlikely relationships

Dating in middle age has advantages: You know yourself better, you’re not as inclined to errors of judgment and you’re less likely to have unrealistic expectations.

But experience also can be a disadvantage. Sometimes too much has already happened in life to one party or the other to make a real connection even possible.

I think that’s part of the meaning of “Cost of Living,” Martyna Majok’s resonant, prismatic, Pulitzer-Prize-winning play from 2018 which has now landed on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in a Manhattan Theatre Club production starring David Zayas, best known for playing Angel Batista on the long-running “Dexter.”

We accumulate pain as we go, Majok is saying. The day-to-day of life costs all of us. The more days we’ve lived, the bigger the price paid.

More specifically, though, the play is exploring the day-to-day life of the disabled, a population for whom at least one aspect of the cost of living is demonstrably greater.

The play is about two couples: Graduate student John (Gregg Mozgala) has cerebral palsy and decides to hire a caregiver to look after him in his Princeton apartment. His choice is Jess (Kara Young), who says she is a Princeton graduate but also someone who now is struggling to make ends meet, working multiple jobs in bars, desperate for money.

Zayas, meanwhile, plays Eddie, a truck driver who, at the beginning of the play, tells us that he has lost his wife but found it comforting to continue to text her even after she was dead. One day, he says, someone at the other end of the number replied. Who was this, he wonders. Perhaps just a matter of a reassigned number, sure, but still enough to set up this play as a mystery.

It takes a while for this character’s story to unspool but the allegedly dead wife in question is Ani (Katy Sullivan), a double amputee. And before long, we are seeing them together.

As is true in the other coupling, both caregiver and care receiver have distinct issues — distinct costs of living, you might say. But in each case, it is the disabled person who is the most aggressive, the most in control. In the case of John, he’s a privileged intellectual capable of remarkable levels of cruelty at Jess’ expense; Ani is as acerbic and self-confident as her partner Eddie is retiring and unsure.

When you’re talking about characters whose historical presence on a Broadway stage has either been erasure or sentimental objectification, that makes “Cost of Living” unlike any play that ever has been on the main stem before.

You certainly could make a case that this is a play that focuses more on the issues faced by caregivers than those tougher ones faced by the disabled. A fair criticism. But Majok’s 100-minute play also is a stereotype buster, a statement that our much-discussed power structures actually are best understood on a case-by-case basis, especially when you’re talking about love, intimacy and sex.

Jess is Black, John is white. That dynamic is present, too; Majok dangles it in the air, never allowing the audience to fall into a bath of comforting conventional wisdom.

You’ll quickly see here that Majok is a highly skilled writer and one of her most impressive qualities is her ability to flip the action on a moment’s notice, to shock the audience or to suddenly pull the characters in an unexpected direction. That happens on several occasions in this script, provoking shouts and gasps from the audience and ensuring that no one without advance knowledge gets ahead of a play that jumps away from you like a fly you are trying to swat for your own comfort.

The actors, working under the direction of Jo Bonney, are honest and solid; Mozgala is a veritable forcefield of signals and manipulations. But the performance from Young is on its own plane. She’s a formidable young star in the making, richly detailed, moving, present and profoundly vulnerable. Her reactions alone are enough to sustain a couple of hours of provocative drama, revealing quietly desperate American characters whom we so rarely see.