Oakland Theater Project Opens 2024 Season with Bay Area Premiere of Pulitzer Prize–winning COST OF LIVING

Oakland Theater Project will open its 2024 Season with the Bay Area Premiere of
Cost of Living, Martyna Majok’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony-nominated play, directed by Emilie Whelan (A Streetcar Named Desire; Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus), at Oakland Theater Project (1501 Martin Luther King Jr Way) from March 1—24.

Eddie, an unemployed truck driver, and his estranged wife, Ani, find themselves unexpectedly reunited after an accident leaves her living with quadriplegia. John, a brilliant PhD student with cerebral palsy, hires Jess, a first-generation recent graduate who has fallen on desperate times, as his new aide. Cost of Living deftly challenges the common preconceived ideas and misconceptions of people living with disabilities and delves deep into the ways class, race, ethnicity, and wealth can create gulfs between people, even as they long to connect.

The cast includes Dorian Locket (Eddie), Christine Bruno (Ani), Carla Gallardo (Jess), and Matthew Placencia (John).

“Her characters speak from the center of their heart. They're so funny and don't hold back - they splash into one another,” said Director Emilie Whelan. “Her worldview gets that life is so unreasonably expensive that we do stupid things. Her plays understand that America's isolationist society drives us into lonely siloed pockets of 'You're this' and 'I'm that' but human beings cannot help but collapse on each other.”

Cost of Living opens Oakland Theater Project’s 2024 Season: Ghosts of Past, Present and Future, seven plays that echo from the past into the present—in hopes of illuminating the future.

“In our 12th year, we seek to interrogate the ghosts that haunt our collective past, present and future so that we might gain clarity about our global predicaments, and find inspiration to move forward,” said OTP Co-Artistic Director Michael Socrates Moran. “With seven shows from divergent lenses all focused on this central theme, we hope this season helps to illuminate the ways in which our experiences can inspire solidarity across difference.”

 

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