A Pulitzer Prize can be a burden, one must assume, trumpeting expectations and pumping reputations from a distance. Martyna Majok‘s Cost of Living won the trophy in 2018, and that victory has been mentioned often in the lead-up to the play’s opening on Broadway tonight in a Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Samuel J.
Friedman Theatre. An often moving, not quite as often cloying but generally disappointing quadruple portrait of two “differently abled” people – the term is loathed by at least one of them – and the not-quite-prepared caregivers enlisted to assist them, Cost of Living does better as character study than workable play.
Still, it has more than a few moments of grace – and a fine cast – that combine to raise it beyond the well-meaning exercise it might otherwise have been.
Cost of Living, directed by Jo Bonney, begins with an out-of-chronology monologue that contributes little but confusion, despite being performed to a T by David Zayas (Dexter, Blue Bloods).
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