The True Cost of Living
I recently did something I’ve never done before — watched a play being livestreamed. The play, Cost of Living, a 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama written by Martyna Majok and performed by Seattle’s Sound Theatre, was well worth experiencing. The playwright, a Polish-born immigrant whose working class mother moved to New Jersey when Martyna was a child, also worked as a personal caregiver while attending college. This, combined with two of the four main characters being played by actors with disabilities, made for an authentic feel to the whole production.
The cast was evenly balanced in other ways as well. A range of class backgrounds were portrayed. The relationship between the disabled characters and their nondisabled caregivers initially focused on the differences and awkwardness of each pair, but gradually they moved on to the ease and intimacy that most relationships need, revealing important commonalities among the main characters. The breakthrough scenes that depicted the delicate balance between intimacy, duty, and understanding came in separate scenes when each caregiver performed regular bathing duties for their care recipients.
I came away from the experience thinking that more media productions like this need to be experienced by mainstream audiences. Most of us with disabilities go about our everyday lives in a kind of personal experience bubble, misunderstood, underappreciated, and typecast (stereotyped) by “polite society.” But Majok’s characters are anything but polite. They represent population groups that too often end up on the short end of the stick, and their feelings of being segregated, whether disabled or not, are united by shared financial and emotional hardships and unrealized potential. The question lingers long after the curtain comes down: How much do societal inequities shape each character’s choices in life?
Cost of Living is a series of up-close moments that reveal the realities of daily living of people with disabilities and their caregivers — the social model of disability under a microscope. In this production, what made all the scenes even more interesting was a handful of audience members who were seated close to the stage perimeter with only their wheelchairs and legs, and sometimes hands, visible in the camera frame. These were the onlookers, faceless people (like most of us) whose lives, in this play at least, are portrayed by actors who know firsthand what our lives are really like.
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We are uniquely aware of the way our true lives and personal needs are seldom center stage. When we do get a bit of the spotlight, it is usually an afterthought or the result of a court ruling. Not so in Cost of Living. The idea of live streaming a play like this is a multiple-win situation. It benefits actors with and without disabilities as well as audience members who have a chance to gain enlightenment and understanding of real social issues that are too often neglected.
The characters with disabilities — Ani, played by Teal Sherer, and John, played by Gerald Waters, both full-time wheelchair users and actors — represent different sides of the same coin. Ani is a working-class woman in her early 40s, while John is a young Harvard graduate from a wealthy family. Both caregiver characters come from blue collar backgrounds. Interestingly, Ani’s ex-husband, Eddie (Drew Hobson), is a novice caregiver trying to make amends for leaving Ani before her accident resulted in quadriplegia. John’s caregiver, Jess, (Viviana Garza), is a Latina woman whose background is somewhat mysterious until her heartbreaking circumstances are revealed near the end of the play.
Plays are meant to be seen and heard. Whether in person or live-streamed, you get the real deal, actors performing in real time. No canned laughter or weeping string sections to set the mood here. Cost of Living is more than drama imitating reality. it’s real life inspiring authentic drama.
A livestream video-on-demand is available here June 22-30 for as little as $7.