It is, unfortunately, the best possible time to be producing a stage adaptation of Barbara Ehrenreich’s bestseller Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. The book, which came out two years ago, is Ehrenreich’s account of going undercover in entry-level jobs, the sort a non-professional divorced woman can get. Cleaning woman and hotel maid. Nursing-home aide and Wal-Mart sales clerk. Downscale restaurant waitress. Her experiences were not encouraging to anyone interested in the plight of the working woman.
At Trinity Repertory Company starting this Friday, both Ehrenreich and the characters she encountered will step off the page, courtesy of Joan Holden, the long-time resident playwright of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. As Holden well knows, a play like this has the potential to fail in many ways. It might be condescending toward the working class. It might be strident agitprop. It might scant the seriousness of the subject with humor that distracts rather than creates perspective. Yet since empathy is the name of the theatrical game, to some extent it has to preach, praise, and coax an occasional laugh to lighten the atmosphere. "If you did realistic, naturalistic drama about these characters, you’d lose the big picture," says Holden. "And this is about the big picture."
For 30 years, Holden produced a play a year for the Mime Troupe, barbed social satires that the company performed outdoors every summer. Beginning in the late 1960s, when campuses were boiling with anti–Vietnam War fervor, the plays toured to wide appreciation; two of them even won Obies. In street-theater tradition, Holden merged melodrama with the broad humor of commedia dell’arte, so she’s had plenty of experience wielding a pen with a light grip.
"My initial take," she says of Nickel and Dimed, "was that this has to be a comedy. That doesn’t mean a boffo laugh every 30 seconds. It’s not a farce. But basically it should be humorous and life-affirming. The life force comes through comedy. The people in the book do not complain. We may see their situation as terrible, but they don’t see themselves as poor."
Nickel and Dimed debuted at Seattle’s Intiman Theatre and went on to a production at Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum that allowed Holden to do some rewriting, as she is doing in Providence. Reviews were kind, for the most part, but she acknowledges that Seattle critics found the Ehrenreich character, the narrator, weakly dramatized. And in any kind of narrative, if we follow a person’s emotional tribulations, it’s harder to fault his or her opinions.
"What happens to Barbara is, in a way, not the main interest," Holden says. "But it’s absolutely necessary — it’s the drive train of the dramatic machine." So most of her rewrites have had to do with making Ehrenreich’s personal journey clearer and more involving. As it happens, the project that started out for Ehrenreich as a magazine assignment ended up destroying her romantic relationship. From the first draft of the theater piece, the boyfriend was there, but in the current version do-gooder Barbara has come to have a running argument with him, his view corresponding to the conservative perspective of some audience members.
"Eighty percent of the people go: ‘Oh my God, I had no idea — this is so important!’ " Holden estimates. "And 20 percent go: ‘Are you saying these people were victims of the system and they didn’t have a choice about how they lived?’ and so on. The basic Republican individualist. A certain number of people always have that reaction."
Holden goes on to point out that Nickel and Dimed offers a class perspective that’s not commonly found in regional theater. Referring to a character called the Rich Lady (who has been eliminated from the script), she says with a wry laugh, "Most plays that this audience sees are about the Rich Ladies and not about the maids."
Nickel and Dimed is at Trinity Repertory Company, 201 Washington Street in Providence, January 31 through March 9. Tickets are $33 to $48; call (401) 351-4242.
