The Cost of Living
Oakland Theater Project at FLAX Art & Design
1501 Martin Luther King Jr. Way
Oakland
Through March 24, 2024
People are people, despite how they might (try to) appear otherwise. And life happens. And people do what humans do when life happens: we put up fronts. But despite the masks we don to cope with the shit that makes us front in the first place — our frustrations, angers, fears — we need each other. And we know what’s real when it’s real: genuineness cracking through by small, intimate demonstrations of care that dissolve all façades.
Oakland Theater Project’s production of Martyna Majok’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Cost of Living, directed by Emilie Whelan, is for real. What’s shown is a whole picture of persons whose lives are fashioned by every other’s in a beautiful dance of guarded wariness and hope.
Whelan realizes Majok’s deeply human play with a depth of empathy and melancholy humor in the face of the heavy crosses each character — Eddie, Ani, Jess, and John — must carry. Eddie, played by Daniel Duque-Estrada, is a Bayonne, New Jersey, truck driver who’s been sober for twelve years, opening the performance with a monologue from a Williamsburg, Brooklyn, bar where he drunkenly and funnily mourns his wife Ani’s death.
”Young people,” he says. “With your fashion, your Pabst.”
Ani, who suffered an accident that left her a quadriplegic, is played by Christine Bruno whose enchanting voice lends vulnerability to the character’s tough, no-nonsense jadedness. She’s pissed-off, as anyone would be in her seat. But her longing for the companionship and marital friendship she and Eddie once shared — he’s now living with another woman — shines with fire.
The other pair of this four-hand piece are Jess and John. Jess, a Princeton graduate, serves as a paid caregiver to John, a privileged and wealthy Ph.D. candidate with cerebral palsy. Theirs isn’t a relationship based in romance, but it could be. John needs someone to attend to bodily routines he isn’t physically able to do himself. And not by someone from an agency (he’s litigious). When John invites Jess over for an evening outside her regular working hours, she arrives dressed-up and with a bottle of wine. But John, played by Matty Placencia, is as blind to her vibe as he is unable to shower or shave himself without assistance for a date with another Ph.D. candidate that evening, the reason he asked Jess over in the first place.
Jess works at a couple bars, but she reservedly takes a job with John to make ends meet. Her ends never meet, wiring most of what she makes to her mother who lives outside the country. Played by Carla Gallardo, who gives her character a tense smolder, Jess is arguably both the toughest-skinned and the most vulnerable. The initial meeting between the two was perhaps a bit too contentious, but Placencia and Gallardo settled into their roles as the performance blossomed.
Duque-Estrada and Bruno absolutely kill in their interactions with one another as Eddie and Ani. My favorite scene was when Eddie bathes Ani, recounting receiving a Casio keyboard as a kid and the musical hopes his parents had for him. He plays her arm as though it were the music of the memory he imparts to her, accompanied by Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies. It’s heartbreaking and exquisitely lovely.
The music and sound effects — down to the subtle buzz of a cell phone — are due to the superb timing of stage manager Kamaile Alnas-Benson. She augments Whelan’s elegantly spare set with deft ears.
The final scene sees a meeting between Eddie and Jess: a present-day encounter that hearkens back to the opening monologue. It is full of day-old pizza and suspicious amity. (Trust me, they pair well.)
Masks come down in this production. And it’s beautiful. And it’s full of love.
