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Labor pains
Nickel and Dimed flattened on stage
BY CAROLYN CLAY

Nickel and Dimed
By Joan Holden. Based on the book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich. Directed by Kevin Moriarty. Set by Beowulf Boritt. Costumes by William Lane. Lighting by Jeff Croiter. Sound by Peter Sasha Hurowitz. With Cynthia Strickland, Angela Brazil, Mauro Hantman, Phyllis Kay, Barbara Meek, Maya Parra, and musician Eric Fontana. At Trinity Repertory Company through March 9.


Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Metropolitan, 2001) is an urgent book. But its conversion to drama is like turning dollars to rubles. Ehrenreich’s best-selling first-person exposé of the demeaning and demoralizing reality of the working poor has been adapted for the stage by the respected long-time playwright for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Joan Holden, who was commissioned to do so by Seattle’s Intiman Theatre, where the work premiered last summer. But despite Holden’s credentials, her play is a series of agitprop skits that inadvertently condescends to the working class and turns the candid Ehrenreich into a whiny proselytizer. Moreover, in its New England premiere at Trinity Repertory Company, the play’s cartoon aspect is underlined by the brightly colored comic-book sets (with real stuff like tables and toilets burped out of the floor) and the dozens of wigs meant to differentiate the various characters played by the small ensemble. Do all of the working poor really have bad hair?

Ehrenreich’s book is a chronicle of her undercover adventures among the underpaid, many of whom had been dismissed from the welfare rolls in the 1990s with the arrogant expectation that they could support themselves on the $7-an-hour jobs that are, by and large, the lot of the unskilled. Ehrenreich, a PhD-wielding social critic and magazine writer, worked as a waitress and motel maid in Florida, as a cleaning woman and nursing-home aide in Maine, and as a Wal-Mart " associate " in Minnesota, chronicling her experiences first in an article for Harper’s and then in her book.

What she experienced (always with a credit card and ticket out in her back pocket) is appalling if not surprising. The work was backbreaking, the wages impossible to get by on, and the treatment patronizing when not abusive. In Florida, the writer finally melted down and walked out, an option unavailable to most of her co-workers. In Maine, she attempted to better the conditions of her less-than-merry fellow maids, for which they resented her. And in Minnesota, where she never found housing, she became so beaten down that she found herself snarling at fellow employees and sneering at the primarily working-class customers.

As with Studs Terkel’s Working, the transfer of Nickel and Dimed to the stage represents an effort to reach a wider audience, to blow a whistle that screams, " Whatever Reagan told you, this isn’t working! People doing a good job of hard work, many of them not even classified below the poverty line, are not making enough money to pay their rent and feed themselves. To say nothing of the toll on the soul. " The play’s politics, if simplistic, are in the right place. But Holden, maintaining that a drama needs a heroine, puts too much emphasis on Ehrenreich and her personal difficulties. She even supplies a supercilious boyfriend with whom the beleaguered writer makes between-job pit stops so that he can list all the glib reasons why the poor are poor and it’s not our problem. Worse are the awkward fourth-wall-breaking pseudo-improvisations, in which the actors, reverting to their own identities, ask the audience how much they pay their cleaning help and whether they would pay higher prices to assure a living wage for the underpaid.

The usually excellent Cynthia Strickland, whose strengths as an actress include a Brechtian toughness, has her moments as Barbara: shrieking at the discovery of a used condom in a motel bed, some acerbic asides, and moving admissions of defeat. Trinity Rep Conservatory student Maya Parra does a nice job with a collected, if foul-mouthed, male short-order cook. And Barbara Meek brings to her roster of workers the sort of differentiation that renders bad wigs superfluous; she’s particularly sharp as a mistrustful motel cleaner and pompous Rastafarian restaurant manager. But there’s not enough drama here for actors like Strickland and Meek to chew on; Holden gives them as slim pickings as the fast-food vittles available to their characters. Nickel and Dimed may serve the commendable purpose of telling better-heeled audience members things they need to know. But as viable drama, it’s small change.

Issue Date: February 13 - 20, 2003
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