Stephen Sachs accepts Ovation Award for Best Production of a Play for “Cost of Living”
The Fountain Theatre dominated the 2020 LA Ovation Awards Monday night, January 13th, by winning six awards, including the prestigious Best Season and Best Production of a Play. The LA Times has referred to the Ovation Awards as the “highest-profile contest for local theatre.”
Hosted by LA Stage Alliance, The Ovation Awards are the only peer-judged theatre awards in Los Angeles, created to recognize excellence in theatrical performance, production and design in the Greater Los Angeles area. Over 300 theatrical productions have competed each year in 35 different categories to be recognized as Ovation Awards recipients. These productions are evaluated by a pool of 250 vetted Ovation voters, all of whom are working theatre professionals of Greater LA.
The Fountain Theatre was honored with the following Ovation Awards:
Best Season
Fountain Theatre — Cost of Living, Daniel’s Husband, Hype Man: A Break Beat Play
Best Production of a Play — Intimate Theater Cost of Living, Fountain Theatre
Acting Ensemble of a Play Cost of Living, Fountain Theatre
Featured Actress in a Play
Xochitl Romero, Cost of Living, Fountain Theatre
Video/Projection Design — Intimate Theater
Nicholas Santiago, Cost of Living, Fountain Theatre
Ovations Honors Recipient
Music Composition for a Play – Romero Mosley, Hype Man, Fountain Theatre
LA STAGE Alliance announced yesterday that the Fountain Theatre has been honored with 18 Ovation Award nominations, the largest number of any intimate theatre for the 2018/19 season. The Fountain’s nominations include Best Season for overall excellence.
The Ovation Awards are the only peer-judged theatre awards in Los Angeles, created to recognize excellence in theatrical performance, production, and design in the Greater Los Angeles area.
During the 2018-29 season, there were 278 total productions registered for the Ovation Awards from 124 different producing bodies, resulting in 199 total nominations for 64 distinct productions presented by 43 organizations. These productions were voted on by 272 Ovation Awards voters — vetted individuals from the Greater Los Angeles area who are working theatre professionals.
The Fountain Theatre received the following Ovation Award nominations:
BEST SEASON Fountain Theatre Cost of Living Daniel’s Husband Hype Man: a Break Beat Play
BEST PRODUCTION OF A PLAY (Intimate Theatre) Cost of Living Daniel’s Husband
ACTING ENSEMBLE OF A PLAY Cost of Living Daniel’s Husband
DIRECTION OF A PLAY John Vreeke – Cost of Living
LEAD ACTOR IN A PLAY Tim Cummings – Daniel’s Husband Felix Solis – Cost of Living
LEAD ACTRESS IN A PLAY Katy Sullivan – Cost of Living
FEATURED ACTOR IN A PLAY Tobias Forrest – Cost of Living
FEATURED ACTRESS IN A PLAY Jenny O’Hara – Daniel’s Husband Xochitl Romero – Cost of Living
LIGHTING DESIGN (Intimate Theatre) Chu-Hsuan Chang – Hype Man: A Break Beat Play Jennifer Edwards – Daniel’s Husband John Garofalo – Cost of Living
SOUND DESIGN (Intimate Theatre) Malik Allen – Hype Man: A Break Beat Play
VIDEO/PROJECTION DESIGN (Intimate Theatre) Nicholas Santiago – Cost of Living
OVATIONS HONORS RECIPIENTS MUSIC COMPOSITION FOR A PLAY Romero Mosley Hype Man: A Break Beat Play
This year’s ceremony will be held at the Theatre at Ace Hotel on Monday, January 13th, 2020. Tickets will go on sale Tuesday, December 3rd, and full information can be found on OvationAwards.com.
Katy Sullivan and Felix Solis in ‘Cost of Living’.
The Fountain Theatre’s acclaimed west coast premiere of Cost of Living by Martyna Majok has been named by Los Angeles Times theatre critic Charles McNulty as “Best in Theater in 2018.” McNulty writes, “The Fountain Theatre’s production of Majok’s “Cost of Living” confirmed just how indispensable 99-seat theaters still are to a healthy theater ecology.”
“Martyna Majok’s searing drama,” McNulty continues, “about the relationship between disabled persons and their caregivers was bravely essayed by the Fountain in a production directed by John Vreeke that revealed just how acutely this Pulitzer Prize-winning drama exposes some vulnerable truths at the heart of the human condition.”
Cost of Living features Tobias Forrest, Xochitl Romero, Felix Solis and Katy Sullivan. The run ends this Sunday, December 16.
The Fountain Theatre believes students and young people must have the opportunity to engage and consider meaningful human issues through the experience of live theatre. We love having students in our audience. They are the artists, arts patrons and arts leaders of tomorrow.
We’re always delighted when teacher Alan Goodson brings his students from Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising to the Fountain Theatre. They recently enjoyed our funny and poignant West Coast Premiere of Martyna Majok’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, Cost of Living. Here are some of the reactions written by the students:
“Overall, the play was an excellent representation of everyday life, not just for one with disabilities, but for those who crave to be pulled out of loneliness. The way that Majok portrayed the play through the eyes of two characters in wheelchairs, as well as their caretakers, was an excellent way to grab the audience’s attention. It was an on-edge performance, with exceptional acting skills. While showing someone with disabilities can be a touchy subject for most, it’s important for others to see that they aren’t the only ones in life that may need a little extra love, or caretaking.”
Tobias Forrest and Xochitl Romero in “Cost of Living”
“Whether it be bathing, eating, or taking part in social life, Cost of Living is a reenactment of what millions of people go through. This thought-provoking piece allows the audience to be vulnerable, uncomfortable, and also gives people a chance the be thankful for the simple things that are often taken for granted.”
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“Cost of Living was a production that completely changed my perception of those that are disabled. I believed that many were strong, and had to carry on with their lives after an incident happens, or even from birth. However, I didn’t realize the actual struggle that these people had to face in daily life, when it comes to daily, normal activities. I not only had sympathy for them, but I also saw their strength and courage and how it can be hard to accept help from others, especially when they see others carrying on their lives normally, when they physically are not able to do so. If the play was able to change my views, it’s able to change many others’ as well.”
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“I believe the director and actors were able to show and bring to life that feeling of what the characters cost of living was. Personally, I can relate to the production in that I have a disability that at times hinders my ability to live life to my fullest. I try not to let it, but at times there is nothing I can do about it being my cost of living.”
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“The play is about disabilities with people, not the other way around. The message of the play is that the biggest disabilities we can have are the ones that every person encounters at some point—loneliness and fear. The worst disabilities are not about having someone bathe or shave you, it’s the ones that make us human and make us all alike in some way. Personally, I found myself somewhere in this play, as I’m sure many others did. It captured me from the very first scene, and made me feel for each character and I related it to struggles in my own life.”
Theatre as a Learning Tool is the Fountain Theatre’s educational outreach program, making theatre accessible to students and young people throughout Southern California.
Playwright Martyna Majok almost missed receiving the call from her agent on winning the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, Cost of Living. She was supposed to be serving jury duty that day. Instead, she had postponed it. She was, therefore, home in her New York apartment to receive the call that would change her career forever.
Sharing the story with our Fountain Theatre audience in a post-show Q&A discussion Saturday night, Martyna explained that her husband, actor Josiah Bania, had the day off work that day. They were planning on doing their taxes. He was taking a nap on the couch when Martyna’s phone rang around three o’clock. Her agent was on the phone screaming, “You won the Pulitzer!” Her reaction? She was furious. “How dare you!” she yelled back. “You know how much this means to me. This is not funny!” For nine minutes on the phone, Martyna’s agent tried to convince her. But she would have none it. It wasn’t until the texts began flooding in from friends — including one from her playwright pal Stephen Adly Guirgis — that she accepted that her wish had come true.
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Since that fateful phone call, her life has spun into a whirlwind of national attention. Yet the work remains the same. The Fountain Theatre is proud to be producing the West Coast Premiere of her funny and beautiful play, and we’re pleased to now call her our friend and a member of our Fountain Family.
Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize, Cost of Living by Martyna Majok is a funny and poignant play about human connection. The West Coast Premiere at the Fountain Theatre stars Tobias Forrest, Xochitl Romero, Felix Solis and Katy Sullivan, directed by John Vreeke.
Cost of Living tells two parallel, relationship-driven stories. John hires a caretaker, Jess, and the pair chip away at their judgmental personalities, slowly becoming friends; and Eddie looks to reconcile with his wife, Ani, after a prolonged period of separation. John has cerebral palsy (CP), a condition caused by abnormal brain development that is characterized by impairment or loss of motor function. Ani, because of a car accident, is a quadriplegic, meaning that all four of her limbs are paralyzed, although Majok’s script notes that “some of the fingers of one hand are partially functioning.”
Katy Sullivan in “Cost of Living”, Manhattan Theatre Club.
Actress Katy Sullivan, who played Ani at MTC to great acclaim, is a bilateral above-the-knee amputee, a disability different from the character Ani’s quadriplegia. Sullivan will return to the role of Ani for the Fountain Theatre West Coast Premiere. Actor Tobias Forrest, a quadriplegic, plays John. Jess and Eddie are able-bodied characters played by Xochitl Romero and Maurice G. Smith.
The following conversation is an excerpt from a January 2018 interview with Majok conducted by Melissa Rodman, a Harvard College senior who wrote her thesis on staging disability in 21st-century American theater. Majok discussed how Cost of Living uses humor and sexuality to paint a picture of four messy, contradictory, funny, and flawed people, destabilizing assumptions about disability.
Melissa Rodman (MR): I was wondering if we could start off talking about Cost of Living and where the inspiration for the play came from, particularly the disabled characters.
Martyna Majok (MM): It started with a monologue. I was struggling economically. I always kind of have. I grew up with very little money, so for me, all the plays are about class. Cost of Living was about class; queens is about class. All these plays are in conversation with class, but America is so focused on identity. That is their lens through which they see just about every play. I don’t know if it’s the same for literature and things like that, but I think particularly for plays where you really have the bodies on stage.
So they said, “Oh, you wrote a play about disabled people or about disability.” I thought, “Well, no, it’s a play about class and loneliness, and it also happens to be told with two disabled bodies.”
So I had that monologue. I didn’t know what to do with it. What am I going to do with this 10-minute play? And, a few months later, I was asked for the 10-minute play festival to write about jobs. And so I thought about my most memorable job, and it was working with a man with CP, while I was in Chicago.
I went to the University of Chicago as an undergrad, and when I graduated, I ended up working for a graduate student at the same university. And so I wrote about that—I mean, I didn’t fall in love with him [laughs]—but I felt like this is a world that most people will not know about. And so, I went with that, and when we presented it, it was a really fascinating experience for me.
My play starts, and it’s just this woman standing onstage, speaking to someone offstage. And as soon as the character John enters in a wheelchair, everybody got so quiet. You felt them feel nervous. And it was so palpable to me. I didn’t know what it was. Were they nervous that I was about to make fun of a disabled character? Were they nervous at just the image of a disabled body?
Tobias Forrest co-stars as John at the Fountain Theatre
I have a friend who says that disability is like a walking reminder of mortality, that when somebody looks at a disabled body, they’re thinking about the fallibility of their own body and death. I’m thinking about that, and I didn’t know, and I thought, “Oh god, my play’s gonna tank.”
And as soon as John has the first joke, the audience was like, “Okay, okay. We can laugh.” But it was like they were still kind of feeling it out. But because he had the control in the scene, and he had the jokes, and he was in charge, people felt comfortable.
And they could laugh and kind of grow with the people. So I thought, “This is fascinating. I have to make a play that put two disabled bodies onstage.”
The stories about disabled characters that I had seen tended to be one of two kinds: one was the “Oh he’s gonna run the marathon,” that sort of an inspirational story, where disabled characters just are such saints that they almost aren’t actual people. So there’s a distance already there.
And the other is the dying-with-dignity narrative, which I think is very dangerous. It makes it seem like there’s only two options. You either have to be an inspirational amazing-genius-achievement person, or you must want to kill yourself. I wanted to make sure that I countered that and offered another narrative, and also for them to have humor and sexuality.
MR: I noticed while reading the play that the stage directions and descriptions of the real physical interactions between the characters really come across. I was wondering how your experiences informed your scripting the play?
Martyna Majok
MM: There are so many things, like how do you shift your weight to be able to accommodate a body being moved from a wheelchair? There are so many specific things, that I would just walk the actors through it. I can’t imagine writing that or trying to figure that out without having experienced it.
The first time I went in, and kind of got trained—I think it was my first day—and the guy, who I was working for with CP was clearly so used to training people how to help him, and so he walked me through it. And so onstage, I walked them through it.
And then for the quadriplegic character, Ani, I had to do more research on my own.
I never wanted to rely on an actor doing my dramaturgy, so I researched as much as I could with that, and talked to people. The two were kind of a combination of past experience and research outside.
MR: That makes sense. I’m thinking more about the playwright’s notes at the beginning, which are very extensive. What was going through your mind when saying Ani and John have to be disabled people playing these characters?
MM: I mean, it’s funny. It became such a big thing. I had just written it thinking, “Well, of course. Like, of course. Did you guys ever think that you had to cast it differently?”
It blew my mind, but then of course I remembered celebrities like Eddie Redmayne and Sam Claflin, the Me Before You actor, played disabled people.
MR: The Jake Gyllenhaals.
MM: Jake Gyllenhaal. People will look at plays and think, ‘Well, at one point he walked, so we have to cast a celebrity and CGI [computer-generated imagery] his legs.
You could CGI the legs onto someone with a disability, if you would like to, to be able to actually give these people opportunities to represent themselves onstage in their own stories. But I think a lot of people will cop out in that way, because it’s economic, like you’re saying.
It’s a risk to cast an unknown actor, disabled or able-bodied. And I understand that, but also if you continue to not let disabled actors play disabled characters—or any character, to be honest—then they’re not going to get the exposure and the experience to then become the Jake Gyllenhaal. R. J. Mitte from Breaking Bad, he’s now an offer-only actor. He’s somebody who was cast in Breaking Bad, who has CP, and now he’s a name. Now more opportunities are open to him, and people consider him for larger roles.
Because it’s not my identity, because I’m not a disabled person, I felt like it would not have been right if I had also taken—not just the identity I wasn’t—but to have it told with people for whom that it’s not their identity.
I think people have been using the excuse, “We just don’t know any disabled actors.” We did a lot of casting. I knew Gregg, who played John at MTC, from like six years before I wrote the play. I didn’t write it for him, but after I had written it, I thought, “Oh, I know somebody who can do this.”
For Ani, it was not difficult to find a disabled actor, it just was difficult to find the right actor, in the way that it is for any role. The most difficult thing was finding somebody who could be brash and have humor and be believably working class, and that was harder than it was to find a disabled actor.
Katy Sullivan
MR: And when you had this team, what did you think about, in terms of actually staging the disability with these four bodies that were assembled? Did things change from script to stage? And then, of course, there are the two iterations, at Williamstown and at MTC.
MM: It’s interesting, ’cause when you see Katy in a wheelchair, you see that she doesn’t have legs and doesn’t have knees. Sullivan was born without knees and legs. So people kept calling the character she played, Ani, a double amputee.
There’s all these things on the Internet, “The play’s about a double-amputee.” I’ve tried so painstakingly to specify the character Ani is a quadriplegic, not a double-amputee. But they’re gonna see what they’re gonna see. From the Williamstown production to the MTC production, the rewrites that I made in between were clarifying exactly what the disability is.
I can say, ‘cerebral palsy,’ and people who don’t know anybody with cerebral palsy might not know exactly what that means. Some people think it’s like an accident versus neurological birth disability. And so, I decided, “Okay, I’m meeting the audience where we’re at.”
I want everyone to come in with a common knowledge. I want them all to feel safely taken care of, and that they’re all on the same knowledge plane. So I think I assumed more people would know more than they did about CP and would listen to more of the language versus see Katy and assume she’s in a wheelchair because she’s a double amputee.
Most of the rewrites were actually about the Jess character. The rewrites tended to be me having to explain how somebody who went to Princeton could end up sleeping in their car. ’Cause this was unbelievable to an audience. [laughs] And so I had to put in clues about how things broke in her life along the way, that she would end up being there.
At one point when I was working on the one for Williamstown, I asked Gregg to describe to me what his body felt like to him, and then asked his permission if I could use some of that language. And so that’s the part [in the play] where he’s talking about his body.
He walked me through what it would feel like to kind of walk, for him specifically, because he went through a lot of dance—physical dance—training, and things like that that enabled more mobility than for somebody who didn’t go through that kind of training. And so he walked me through what the body feels, and I thought that was interesting and important, ’cause I also didn’t know what it feels, literally what it feels like, and we’re talking about bodies. And so, in that sense, that was a really great collaboration.
And, I mean, the stages were different. Williamstown has a raised proscenium, so at one point they just realized, because the actors are in motorized wheelchairs, if they go out of control, they’re going to end up in the audience. [laughs]
You do have to kind of change things a little bit, but it’s fine. There’s ways, you know, it’s just part of it.
MR: You mentioned different kinds of audience perceptions of all of the characters. Can you talk a bit more about the audience response and how that factored into some of the staging choices?
MM: I think most of them had to do with responses to class, I guess.
There was an interesting experience Gregg had after a show.
Katy comes out, and she has her prosthetic legs on, and she doesn’t enter in the [prop] wheelchair. And Gregg enters walking, also without his prop wheelchair.
There was somebody who came up to him after the show, and said, “I’m so glad that you’re not actually disabled. Oh my God! Thank God!” And he told them he actually is disabled, that he does have CP. But this response of “Thank God! Thank God it was just pretend!” That was really interesting.
I was at some of the talkbacks, and I think people were surprised at the humor. They were expecting a certain kind of story.
With the last three plays I’ve done, which all have serious capital letters—they’re about poverty and immigration and disability—people are assuming that that’s gonna be a sad story [laughs], or it’s just gonna be a super serious story. I’ve learned to train audiences early on that they can and should laugh.
So I front-load a lot of jokes that I usually give to the person that is the “other,” that’s gonna be perceived as the “other,” so that they’re the ones who are in control of the humor and driving it, and the audiences connect with that person.
MR: Are there any other things that you wanted audiences to take away from the characters?
MM: I think the one about suicide or the idea of giving up never came into the conversation. Sexuality was a big one. I wanted to have sexy scenes and have a person taking agency with their own sexuality and pleasure. Hopefully, it’s like a widened lens that somebody has about another person’s life. It’s a wider empathy that they have.
I have a lot of friends who are disabled. I have a huge group of playwriting friends, but part of that group is people with disability. And so they will tell me about people assuming pity for them, and that gaze, that was something I did not want at all present in it.
People will say, “Oh, you poor thing,” or “That must be so hard,” and they’re assuming that they’re suffering daily and every minute and are thinking about their disability all the time. And I wanted to add more in the lives of these characters than just that.
Katy Sullivan will reprise her off-Broadway role in the West Coast premiere of Martyna Majok‘s Pulitzer Prize winning drama Cost of Living at the Fountain Theatre. Her acclaimed 2017 performance as Ani at Manhattan Theatre Club earned Sullivan nominations for the Lucille Lortel Award, Drama League Award, and Outer Critic’s Circle Award.
Joining Sullivan in the Fountain Theatre production are Tobias Forrest (Wisdom of the Crowd, Special Unit), Maurice G. Smith (Meet the Browns) and Xochitl Romero (Queens, La Jolla Playhouse). Eileen Grubba (Fear the Walking Dead) will understudy Ms Sullivan. John Vreeke directs.
Achingly human and surprisingly funny, Cost of Living is a haunting, rigorously unsentimental play about the forces that bring people together and the realities of facing the world with physical disabilities. Unemployed truck driver Eddie is struggling to rebuild a relationship with his estranged wife Ani, facing life in a wheelchair with a spinal cord injury. Jess, in a job that she desperately needs, is trying to navigate her duties with John, her new boss with cerebral palsy. But, who is really caring for whom? By shattering stereotypes, the play reveals how deeply we all need each other. In addition to the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Cost of Living won the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play.
Cost of Living opens at the Fountain Theatre October 20 and runs to December 16. Tickets go on sale September 12. More Info