What if your theater review were fractured? Broken apart and rearranged to get at something new about a staged work, to get at something different about the experience? To celebrate worthy work but in ways perhaps odd but intimate? Would you read it if you were veteran review seeker? Would you read it if you weren’t? Will you read it now?
I am trying something out, readers, and you are my guinea pigs. (I had one once, a guinea pig. Her name was Nibbles. I loved her — as much as the third-grade me could — and I feel a certain fondness for you.) So, please share in this wee experiment, which is sure to need refining.
To wit: Here are five reasons to spend your valued time at the “The Cost of Living,” Martyna Majok’s award-winning play about caregivers, care receivers and the prickly and moving nature of that relationship. The Curious Theatre Company, in collaboration with the disability-wise Phamaly Theatre Company, is giving this often-humorous drama a welcome and timely regional premiere, running through April 20.
In “The Cost of Living,” John (Jamie Rizzo) and Jess (Valentina Fittipaldi) navigate the complicated economics of caretaking. (Michael Ensminger, provided by Curious Theatre Company)
Phamaly artistic director Ben Raanan steers the vibrantly attuned ensemble of Valentina Fittipaldi, Isaiah Kelley, Jamie Rizzo and Ann Colby Stocking.
Reason No. 1. These bodies in these rooms.
In “The Cost of Living,” two actors use wheelchairs, two do not. John (Jamie Rizzo, a Phamaly company member) is a not-at-all-gentle PhD candidate with cerebral palsy who hires Jess (Fittipaldi) to help with his daily needs. Ani (Stocking, grudgingly allows her ex-husband, onetime long-haul driver Eddie (Kelley), back into her life and apartment after an accident that has left her reliant on a wheelchair.
“Bodies in a room! Bodies in a room!” I’m known to palaver when pondering what distinguishes theater from, say, film. Theater audiences share a potent space with characters but also their performers. There is a peculiar pact between actors and audience. What unfolds on stage asks us to be present to the human drama, folly and so forth, but also to those people acting out those scenarios.
So what happens to theater (small and cap T) and us when those bodies — and the incumbent stories — aren’t the so-called typical ones? One of the distinguishing traits of the Phamaly Theatre Company is that it was founded by and casts people with disabilities. Those can range from those made visible by a cane, a wheelchair, captioning or signing, and those that may not be so readily identifiable, e.g., neurodivergent or autoimmune conditions.
How John and Jess, Ani and Eddie navigate their separate realities but also engage and spar with each other offer lessons in accommodation that go beyond issues of disability to ones of class, yearning and economics.
Reason No. 2. It won a big prize.
Eddie (Isaiah Kelley, fight) returns to take care of his estranged wife, Ani (Ann Colby Stocking) in Martyna Majok’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “The Cost of Living.” (Michael Ensminger, provided by Curious Theatre Company)
Sure, these sorts of kudos — Tonys, Oscars, Emmys, Grammys — necessarily come with an asterisk, but they can also signal where the culture is and isn’t. The finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2018 were Branden Jacob-Jenkins’ “Everybody” (which the Boulder-based Catamounts produced in 2019) and Tracy Letts’ “The Minutes,” which Curious produced last fall. Those are heady plays, grappling with ideas about power. Majok’s prize-winning drama wrestles, too, and has no shortage of ideas. But it deftly weaves its challenging and humane insights about the vulnerabilities wrought by being embodied with those conditions shaped by the economic forces driving up the costs of living.
Reason No. 3. Two theater companies are better than one.
“Cost of Living” brings together two of the metro area’s most intrepid theater companies: Curious, with its “No Guts, No Story” mantra and Off-Broadway smarts, and Phamaly, one of the nation’s maverick outfits. Created by theater professionals with disabilities to give opportunities to other theater professionals with disabilities, Phamaly serves as a reminder that necessity really does nurture invention. Concurrent with this collaboration, Phamaly is also producing the sleuthy, witty romp “Miss Holmes” at the Northglenn Arts, through April 7. (Get tickets at phamaly.org.)
Reason No. 4. Water!
Why water onstage elicits a bit of awe — as if plumbing were a miracle (it is) — I cannot say. But it’s got a wow factor. A working shower and a sloshing bathtub figure mightily into the power dynamics of “The Cost of Living.”
At one point in the play, a bathtub is wheeled onto the stage with Ani in it covered by bubbles. What transpires between Ani and Eddie is humorous and tender but also unexpectedly yet unsurprisingly harrowing.
There is intimacy in the act of being bathed and bathing another person. What this means for John (employer) and Jess (employee) is different than how it unfolds between Ani and Eddie.
From the start, John has leaned from time to time on a kind of intellectual privilege when interacting with Jess. The driven child of an immigrant mom, Jess attended Princeton but now attends to John’s physical needs before heading to the late shift at a bar. A wheelchair-accessible shower in John’s apartment becomes one of the central sites where Jess and John come clean with each other, so to speak.
Reason No. 5. It’s deeply intelligent — and moving.
When the Pulitzer committee awarded the play its 2018 prize, it hailed “The Cost of Living” as an “honest, original work that invites audiences to examine diverse perceptions of privilege and human connection through two pairs of mismatched individuals.” It’s a little hard to know what exactly they meant by “mismatched.” After all, the intersection at which people with disabilities meet the folks not yet contending with a disability (as some disability rights advocates might assert with a prophetic clarity) is not fixed. If you are reading this and you or a loved one isn’t dealing with a disability, just wait. Consider that a bit of tough-love insight.
IF YOU GO
“Cost of Living”: Written by Martyna Majok. Directed by Ben Raanan. Featuring Valentina Fittipaldi, Isaiah Kelley, Jamie Rizzo and Ann Colby Stocking. At the Curious Theatre Company, in collaboration with the Phamaly Theatre Company, 1080 Acoma St.. Through April 20. For tickets and info: curioustheatre.org or 303-623-0524