RTW's Midwest Premiere of "Cost of Living" is a Triumph

As the lights come up on Renaissance Theaterworks’ transcendant production of Cost of Living, a middle-aged, blue collar guy from Jersey is sitting in a hipster bar in the swanky Williamsburg neighborhood, nursing a seltzer and lime with a look of bemused disbelief on his face. It’s bad enough that he feels painfully out of place. Now Eddie (Bryant Bentley) has been stood up by a woman who’s been texting him, who might not even be real. He makes self-deprecating small talk and forces himself to laugh as he shakes the icecubes in his glass, trying to stave off a gloom that has almost swallowed him whole in the past three months.

Eddie is one of the four extraordinary characters in Martyna Majok’s play who is weighing his need for human connection and intimacy with “the cost of living” – the price of his own vulnerability and the exhaustion that comes after things have been too hard for too long.

His balancing act between hope and despair is just one of many reasons to see this delicately transformative play, running through February 12 in the Next Act theater space, produced in collaboration with Phamaly Theatre Company and Pink Umbrella Theater Company. Another great reason to catch this Midwest premiere is to see characters onstage that you’ve probably never encountered before; two of the four actors are people who live with disabilities, using wheelchairs to get around. Their unique stories are part of a profound examination of four loosely connected individuals as they grapple with love, loneliness, desperation, loss, and family responsibility. With a poetic and spare script, nuanced, authentic performances across the board, and sure-handed direction by Ben Raanan, Cost of Living is simply a triumph.

We meet Jess (Valentina Fittipaldi) and John (Jamie Rizzo) as he is interviewing her for a job as his personal assistant. A Harvard grad and PhD candidate at Princeton who lives with cerebral palsy, John has a great intellect and a sharp-edged sense of humor, but he is also used to being underestimated, literally looked down on, and talked over, since his speech has a different cadence. With disarming directness he makes it clear that doesn’t need pity, he simply needs help with daily tasks like showering and shaving.

John meets his match in Jess, the daughter of a South American immigrant who seems desperate to take any job, including a lot of shifts as a cocktail waitress, even though she has an Ivy League degree. Jess is also used to being underestimated, and communicates her “take it or leave it” attitude clearly through her body language. When John doubts her qualifications, she insists that she can manage – whatever she hasn’t done before, she’ll figure out – and we are left with no doubt that she will. Their later conversations about privilege are as fascinating as they are uncomfortable.

Fittipaldi wears Jess’s determination like a bullet-proof vest throughout most of the play, daring the world to come at her and meeting it with a defiant tilt of her chin. But we can also see the heaviness of the young woman’s task and the toll it is taking in her tired eyes. With a hint of an accent (the actress is originally from Brazil) she imbues Jess with the waryness an outsider who is in survival mode. Behind a tough poker face, she holds her character’s thoughts and feelings firmly inside until Jess believes she’s found a safe haven for them – only to be crushed when it turns out she was mistaken.

In a beautiful juxtaposition, Rizzo’s John quietly acknowledges his physical vulnerability in the process of being bathed, while prodding his caregiver to open up emotionally. His patience and casual conversation during Jess’s awkward dance of shaving him for the first time is generous, but comes with questions and information he wants in return. The physical and verbal tension between the two is exquisite.

Unlike John, who has dealt with physical challenges throughout his life, Ani (Regan Linton) has been in a recent car accident, leaving her wheelchair-bound with only the slightest use of her fingers. Adjusting to a colorless, fully-accessible apartment, a painful and slow course of physical therapy, and nurses aids to help her with every task, Ani isn’t anyone’s inspiration. She’s angry and depressed. This makes her soon-to-be ex-husband Eddie an ironically good choice for a substitute caregiver. He knows her. He loves her still, even if neither one of them is completely comfortable with the new reality of Ani’s body.

Linton’s Ani can no longer feel much in her extremities, but she is allowing herself to grieve the loss of her old life fully, for as long as it takes. Her face stern and sullen, she carries a heavy disappointment that makes her prickly – deservedly so. And like Jess, the moment Ani begins to look forward to the future, opening herself up to possibility, reality comes crashing back down around her.

In another bathing scene, Eddie gently washes his almost ex-wife, shares a cigarette with her, and gives her a whimsical shoulder massage. It is an extraordinary moment of intimacy, but one that leads to a truly frightening moment of vulnerability. Linton’s entire emotional arc changes in this scene, which edges towards happiness before it is harrowing.

As the aforementioned Eddie, Bentley brings a tentative but steady warmth to his scenes with Ani, and his easy laugh lifts the character, who makes silly, inappropriate jokes to cover up his uncertainty. His total shift to honest neediness when Eddie meets Jess, shivering outside on a snowy night, reveals how thoroughly he’s haunted by his own pain.

Utilitarian set design by Sarah Ross is purposefully monochromatic and functional, opening in clever way to reveal new rooms. Folding and unfolding, it accommodates smooth transitions across many locations from scene to scene. The set also includes two screens for projected supertitles for an added element of accessibility, which are both helpful and surprisingly unobtrusive.

This gorgeous, multi-layered play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2018 and enjoyed successful runs both on- and Off-Broadway, but Cost of Living is rarely produced in regional theater because it is hard to cast; it requires actors with specialized skills and backgrounds. The fact that Renaissance Theaterworks chose to take on this difficult project and simultaneously meaningfully address accessibility issues – while spending twice their normal budget for a single production – is admirable. But that is not why this play deserves to be seen. Cost of Living deserves to be on everyone’s must-see list because it is startlingly beautiful. The crux of the play does not revolve around the fact that half of the characters are disabled. It hinges on the fact that people with disabilities have unique, funny, complex, poignant stories, just as we all do. Seeing them should not be the exception onstage, it should be the norm because it makes all of our experiences richer.

Post Script

RTW's Midwest Premiere of "Cost of Living" is a Triumph