Why ‘Cost of Living’ Is on the Broadway Forefront

variety.com:

Gordon Cox Theater Editor For the actor Gregg Mozgala, his Broadway debut in “Cost of Living” isn’t just a step forward for him — it’s a step forward for all of Broadway. Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below: “We’re on the forefront of something,” he said on the latest episode of “Stagecraft,” Variety’s theater podcast, in a conversation with his co-star Kara Young.

Mozgala, who has cerebral palsy, is one of two disabled performers who play disabled characters in playwright Martyna Majok’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama. “The fact that we are embodying these characters who have physical disabilities on Broadway — for aeons the practice has been to cast non-disabled actors in disabled roles.

That kind of erasure and symbolic annihilation is something we have just been dealing with forever.” He added, “My body onstage is a radical experimental act.” In “Cost of Living,” Mozgala plays John, a Princeton graduate student, opposite Young (a Tony nominee for “Clyde’s”) as his caregiver, Jess.

Young said she also finds a highly personal resonance in her own role in the show. “The first-generation American experience can be very universal: what hard work means, what survival means, what it means to feel like you have a great responsibility to take care of your own in a way that it really does fall on your shoulders to uplift and continue legacy in some kind of way,” Young said. “The story of survival, you know?” With her performance, she explained, “I’m trying to honor this very real person that represents a lot of us first-gen Americans in this country.” On the new episode of “Stagecraft,” Young and Mozgala talk through the process of staging the intimate details of caregiving, including making sure the onstage