‘Cost of Living’ won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2018, an award I was totally unaware of.  I came to this play because the writer, Martyna Majok has written the book for the upcoming premiere of ‘Gatsby’ at the American Repertory Theater, our neighbor in Cambridge.

Majok was born in Poland and emigrated as a child with her mother to live in New Jersey. Educated at U of Chicago and then Yale’s Drama School and Juilliard, she writes about her life experiences as a poor immigrant whose early jobs involved caring for disabled individuals.

The play’s four characters are engaged in life struggles in two very separated settings.  John, a Harvard graduate, a PhD student at Princeton,  and a wealthy man, has cerebral palsy, and, limited to his wheel chair, interviews Jess, a Black woman.  Jess is a Princeton graduate, but for unclear reasons, is  struggling to make ends meet with several bartender jobs.  The other twosome are Eddie, an unemployed Hispanic truck driver sober for 12 years and married to Ani for ‘twenty and nearly one more’.  Ani, a Polish immigrant, is confined to a wheelchair after an accident resulted in quadriplegia and amputations.

These two couples engage in extended dialogues, often funny and often bitter, as they struggle to navigate a world characterized by the inequities of privilege and poverty, education and its lack, ableness and disability, sobriety and addiction.  Eddie introduces the play in a prologue, and the final scene finds him and Jess tentatively and haltingly perhaps beginning a new life together.  Majok specifically calls for casting of individuals who are both diverse and living with the disabilities portrayed on the stage.

This was a powerful play to read and  to be confronted with the harsh realities of living for those less fortunate in the lottery of Life.  The play premiered at the Williamstown Festival in 2016 and off Broadway in 2018.  When it premiered on Broadway in 2023, the New York Times theater critic wrote the following:  “This play left me breathless, and I’m not just using a manner of speech. As I made my way through the crowd of people exiting the theater, I took hard, shallow breaths, knowing that one deep inhale could set off a downpour of tears. This production either broke or mended something in me; I felt — brilliantly, painfully, cathartically — near the point of physical exhaustion.

I hope to someday see this play performed, but until then, I look forward to see how Majok handles Fitzgerald’s great novel as it moves to the stage.