John, a wealthy, brilliant, and successful PhD student with cerebral palsy, hires Jess, a recent graduate who has fallen on hard times, as his new carer. Across town, truck driver Eddie attempts to support and re-engage with his estranged wife, Ani, following a terrible accident that has left her quadriplegic.
As four very different lives collide and entwine, roles are unapologetically flipped, reversed and exposed – who is actually caring for whom?
Martyna Majok’s exquisitely original, honest and deftly funny new play Cost of Living explores our need to connect and be loved regardless of the gulfs that disability, race, class, and wealth place between us.
Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Cost of Living was first seen at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2016, and had its UK premiere at Hampstead Theatre, London, in January 2019.
‘A richly empathetic work that asks searching questions about who or what defines us, and what we owe to each other. Frank, funny and thrumming with feeling, in its best moments it bypasses the head and strikes right at the heart’
— Broadway World
‘A rare combination of matter-of-fact candour and watchful empathetic insight’
— Independent
‘Dares to venture to places few dramas go, examining with a kind of wide-eyed truthfulness the lives of a marginalised quartet struggling to get by… Majok’s writing has a poetic naturalism’
— WhatsOnStage
‘A tough drama that earns its poignancy… gets under your skin through its ability to provoke feeling without lapsing into sentimentality’
— Guardian
‘Cost of Living is perfection. It reawakens my belief in the poetry of theater and highlights its purpose as the critical eye on our human existence… Majok brilliantly infuses her characters and dialogue with biting humor’
— New York Theatre Guide
‘Full of effective moments… deeply felt’
— Village Voice
‘By toppling old prejudices, Majok forces us to revisit our easy assumptions about people who don’t really want to be called “differently abled” and caregivers who could use a little love themselves’
— Variety
Pulitzer Prize for Drama
