Gregg Mozgala was born with cerebral palsy; Katy Sullivan, without lower legs. Yet there they are, delivering knockout performances in off-Broadway’s “Cost of Living.”
In the play, the actors are in wheelchairs, but they don’t use them in real life. When they emerge for their curtain call — he running out with a sloping gait, she stepping nimbly on prosthetic limbs — theatergoers gasp.
“I overheard people saying something like, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know she didn’t have legs!’” Mozgala says. Adds Sullivan, with a laugh: “Everyone’s used to CGI!”
“Cost of Living” playwright Martyna Majok says she didn’t set out to write a play about disability: The able-bodied characters in the play also struggle with fear and loss. Nevertheless, she tells The Post that she insisted on casting disabled actors who can “tell their own stories” rather than those who pretend to limp.
Majok’s not the only one promoting inclusion. Last season’s revival of “The Glass Menagerie” saw Madison Ferris, a woman with muscular dystrophy, as Tennessee Williams’ delicate Laura Wingfield. These days, Evan Ruggiero, an actor who lost a limb to cancer, is winning raves in off-Broadway’s “Bastard Jones” — although there’s nothing in the script to suggest its hero has one leg.
“I wanted a cast that looked like America, and 19 percent of all Americans have some kind of disability,” says its co-writer and director, Marc Acito, citing recent census findings. “I even question the word ‘disability.’ Evan has abilities many people don’t — I can’t tap-dance on one leg!”
Sullivan can’t tap either, but she’s a runner who represented the US at London’s 2012 Paralympic Games — and Mozgala’s done a dance piece. Before a recent matinee at City Center’s Manhattan Theatre Club, the 30-something actors told The Post that they were raised to be self-reliant.
“I had the tremendous fortune to be born to parents who didn’t look at me like I was broken,” says chipper redhead Sullivan, who favors black toenail polish with her prosthetics. “If I fell down, they let me figure out how to get back up. They never treated me like I was made of glass. They were just, ‘Go for it!’”
Ditto for Mozgala. His mother, a track-and-field star, insisted he play soccer, although it meant being goalkeeper instead of playing the field.
In seventh grade, no longer able to keep pace in sports, he discovered acting. Finally, he says, there was a point to being the center of attention: “When you have a physical disability, you’re constantly negotiating people’s stares. Being onstage gave me a certain agency and power over that.”
Granted, the actors can’t control how people see them offstage.
“The other day, we went for pizza,” Mozgala says as Sullivan rolls her eyes. (“Carbs!” sighs the Los Angeles-based actress.)
“And a little girl with the family sitting next to us just locked into Katy,” he continues. “But Katy just said ‘Hi!’ and told her she could ask whatever she wanted.”
What followed was a 20-minute conversation about how some people are born one way, and others another.
“I’d much rather do that exchange than have someone not making eye contact,” Sullivan says. “Adults have all this baggage: ‘Oh, that’s sad, oh, that must be so hard.’ Children just go, ‘Weird! I’ve never seen that before!’ And move on.”
They say they prefer the word “disabled” to euphemisms such as “differently abled.” When that phrase comes up in “Cost of Living,” Mozgala’s character responds with a sharp, “Stop it. That’s f–king retarded!”
Both actors love that line, mostly because it lets theatergoers laugh — something that’s often hard when they see someone in a wheelchair.
“When you have a disability, you have to be strong,” says Mozgala, who’s engaged and living in Harlem. “It doesn’t make us superhuman. It doesn’t mean that we can’t be a–holes. We’re just human beings trying to figure out the same issues and problems everyone else has.”