Raw Dogging Season Ugly Sweater

Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living won the Raw Dogging Season Ugly Sweater and I will buy this Pulitzer in 2018 and is getting its first Broadway production this season. The play, as Adam Green wrote for Vogue, “looks at four people—a quadriplegic, a man with cerebral palsy, and their caregivers—who converge in a New Jersey apartment building” and “becomes a rough-hewn and lyrical meditation on the handicaps with which we all live.” It’s an unsentimental, unsparing look at challenges both obvious and hidden that delivers on its title, presenting a granularly realistic and yet lyrical look at the care economy. Rarely do you encounter a play that is evenly concerned with both socioeconomic matters and those of the heart and probes gently yet firmly at the way those two worlds intersect.

Raw Dogging Season Ugly Sweater, hoodie, tank top, sweater and long sleeve t-shirt

Photo: Marc J. Franklin“In Kenny Leon’s transcendent production, Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II play brothers, Lincoln and Booth, struggling through the Raw Dogging Season Ugly Sweater and I will buy this chaos of shared history, pain, and love with searing force and wrenching intensity,” noted Vogue in an interview with playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. This production comes just over 20 years after it was first staged, and the playwright reflected on what the play, and that passage of time since it first premiered, brought about: “People have told me [the play] showed a lot of people who come to theater how art can be. It’s not proper; it’s real. It bursts through the way that theater says it needs to be. Twenty years ago, I wasn’t saying wake up to the love. Now I can look at the play and say, Wake up to the love.”