Cost of Living

Cost of Living, a play by Martyna Majok, premiered in 2016 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. It transferred to an off-Broadway theatre in 2017, produced by Manhattan Theatre Club, and is slated to debut on Broadway in fall, 2022. The play was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and also won a 2018 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play. The title of the play refers not only to the monetary costs of staying alive, but the emotional costs of love, life, and connecting with another person. The play demonstrates that basic survival is expensive and a privilege in a capitalist society; three of the four characters struggle with the cost of housing, medical care, and food.

Money doesn’t negate other types of marginalization. Cost of Living presents, through four characters, the way oppression manifests at the intersection of, among other things, disability, race, nationality, gender, age, education, and financial privilege.

Stylistically, the play has elements of realism and naturalism. Majok focuses particularly on disability, and the realities of caregiving and being cared for. As inexperienced caregivers, neither Eddie nor Jess fully understand what being disabled means for Ani and John. The play’s relationships hinge on a need to trust while being physically vulnerable, and the issues that arise when that trust is difficult. The idea of vulnerability extends to each of the characters, their loneliness, and their longing for connection, which is complicated by the fear of letting another person get close.

Majok specifies that both of her disabled characters should be played by disabled actors, that the play needs “a cast that looks like North Jersey and its beautiful diversity” (5). In the urban settings of New Jersey and Brooklyn, each of the characters has become isolated and distrustful of others, emphasizing the way city life in particular can leave marginalized people on the outskirts of community and communal support. The play has two storylines—one between John and Jess, the other between Eddie and Ani. These remain separate until the final scene, when Eddie and Jess make a tentative, precarious connection of friendship and support, and their loneliness outweighs their differences. 

Content Warning: The play and this guide include discussions of disability. The guide sometimes reproduces offensive, ableist slurs and language.

Plot Summary

The play is presented in one act with no intermission. On a Friday night, the week before Christmas, Eddie sits in a hipster bar drinking a seltzer. He is a man in his forties, a trucker who lost his license after a DUI, and a recent widower. Out of loneliness, he has been sending texts to his dead wife. But tonight, he received a text back from whoever was reassigned her number. They told Eddie to meet them at the hipster bar but didn’t show up.

The play flashes back to early September: A young, first-generation immigrant named Jess is interviewing to be a private caretaker for John, a Princeton PhD student. John is an attractive, wealthy man who uses a wheelchair due to cerebral palsy. Jess graduated from Princeton and now works multiple jobs in bars. Both are in their twenties. After a fairly unfriendly interview, he hires her. Over the next two months, they establish a rapport, and then one Friday, John asks Jess to come over. She agrees and arrives that night, dressed for a date, but John only wants her to bathe him before he goes out on a date with another graduate student. Jess asks if she can stay in his apartment while he’s gone just to be somewhere warm and nice, but John hesitates and says no. He doesn’t trust her, because he noticed that she stole some soap. Humiliated, Jess runs out.

The scenes between John and Jess alternate with scenes between Eddie and his wife, Ani, who became a paraplegic in a car accident six months earlier. Eddie and Ani were separated at the time of her accident after 20 years of marriage. She has no one and he is her emergency contact. He helps her after receiving word that her nurse had quit. Ani resists his help and knows that Eddie has a new girlfriend, but she eventually gives in. Eddie and Ani become closer as the care he provides becomes more personal and intimate. In their last scene together, Ani nearly drowns when he leaves her in the bathtub for a few minutes.

The Epilogue takes place in Eddie’s New Jersey apartment on the same Friday night as the Prologue. After leaving the bar, Eddie spots Jess sleeping in her car. She has been living in her car for months while sending money to her sick mother who went back to her home country. Jess is wearing the same dress she had on earlier in the evening when she left John’s. Eddie had told Jess that he had a wife to make her feel safer, but he admits that his wife died of a blood clot. He is lonely and shows a fatherly concern for Jess’s safety, offering to let Jess move in for cheap rent. Jess is extremely wary of Eddie and the food he gives her. Suddenly Jess walks out. Eddie’s phone buzzes, but he’s afraid to look at it. Then Jess returns, offering coffee from her car to go with the pizza.