Martyna Majok (‘Cost of Living’) gets personal writing about ‘little miracles of connection’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
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“When I write plays, I hope that they’re useful,” confesses “Cost of Living” playwright Martyna Majok. “I write them partly to feel less alone myself. And I hope that in going to the theater and experiencing it, that people can feel less alone in their circumstances.” She won the Pultizer Prize for drama for this script, which transferred to Broadway this season at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Using her own life as a guide, she crafted a story where four characters search for connection and hope. Watch the exclusive video interview above.
Majok describes the play as “a time capsule for a period of a lot of uncertainty and precarity in my life. As well as a particular kind of American loneliness.” Having just moved to New York after completing her graduate degree, she didn’t have enough money to afford a security deposit on an apartment. So she bounced around through thirteen different sublets while trying to make ends meet. As if the financial stress wasn’t enough, she also lost a man from Poland who had been a father figure to her and was unable to travel for his funeral. ”I felt like the city just hazed me,” she admits.
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After being fired from a bartending job when she was wrongly accused of stealing $100, Majok returned to her sublet. “I just started writing a monologue for this man,” she describes. He sat in a bar, down on his luck, and suffering from intense grief over the loss of his wife. Majok poured aspects of several father figures in her life into this character. The monologue would evolve into the opening scene of “Cost of Living.” Other characters formed in her head, all dealing with some type of “precarity” in their lives. When she realized these separate characters all seemed to be speaking to similar themes, the play took shape.
The four characters in the play have “no reason to believe that life will take care of them,” according to the playwright. Life has thrown huge setbacks and losses their way, turning them into lonely beings in search of hope. This is evidenced in the final scene where Jess (Kara Young) and Eddie (David Zayas) choose to reach out through their trauma and accept the human kindness and connection in front of them, at least for one night. Mayok asserts that the play is about what she calls “little miracles of connection…the almost kind of cosmic connections that people have.”
It isn’t easy for Majok to place so many aspects of her personal life in the play. “It’s agony to mine your own demons and then structure them into an arc for other people,” she says. But, writing from this authentic place results in a type of catharsis, even though the journey is trying. “Going through that process helps me access the fullest version of life for myself. As well as my own understanding of other people,” Mayok explains. ”I just feel fuller at the end of it. I feel like the plays become smarter than I ever could on my own without having gone through it.”
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