Subsidized Living: Reflections on Bringing Nickel and Dimed to the Stage

Over the course of a year and a half, from 1998 to 2000, journalist and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich went "undercover," on assignment for Harper's, working low-wage jobs for a month in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota. In those boom economic times, she chronicled her ease at finding work (although never for more than $7.50 an hour), difficulty in securing housing, and amusing and humiliating attempts to learn the ropes of different jobs, and she told stories about the lives of her coworkers, who lacked her emergency ATM card and never-too-distant escape back to middle-class life. The resulting articles formed her best-selling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America.

Bartlett Sher, artistic director of the Intiman Theater, heard an interview with Ehrenreich in 2001, read the book, and found its exploration of the lives of low-wage workers politically and emotionally compelling. What should he do but try to bring it to the stage? After securing the theatrical rights, he commissioned Joan Holden, veteran writer of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, to craft its adaptation. Nickel and Dimed premiered at the Intiman in August 2002 under Sher's direction; the production transferred to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in the fall. The script, with a different director and cast, was produced at Trinity Repertory Theater in Providence, Rhode Island, in February 2003. To supplement their productions, the theaters sponsored discussions with community activists on the living wage movement, the housing crisis, and the resources available in their respective communities.

I attended the inaugural production at the Intiman, where my overwhelming impression was of the play's velocity: Sher, with set designer John Arnone, kept the actors in motion for much of the play's two and a half hours. Sharon Lockwood's "Barbara" dashed around the stage's turntable, trading her waitress's uniform for her apron as a hotel maid as the rest of the ensemble worked against the clock or customers' appetites to keep food hot, salads made, and bathtubs grime free. The physical tumult was matched by Barbara's frenetic glut of political analysis and fear of failure. The cacophony reached a surreal caesura in the third act, as Barbara encountered "Mall-Mart" (a euphemism for Wal-Mart) in Minnesota: the stage transformed into a landscape of fluorescent lights and clothing racks, glistening demonically as the ensemble spun slowly across the stage in an inhuman ballet. The only physical respite from all this motion came when Barbara would hole up in her disproportionately expensive housing to determine whether she could afford to eat (usually she could) and sleep (shelter proved her primary difficulty).

In adapting Nickel and Dimed for the stage, Holden gave more focus to the figures at the margins of Ehrenreich's first-person account. The first intrusion into Barbara's logorrhea comes in the middle of the first act when her fellow maid Carlie confides to the audience her distrust of this eager woman in $80 athletic shoes. In the second act, Barbara stages a work stoppage to protest the extreme conditions in which she and her fellow "Magic Maids" work for $6.65 an hour, while the franchise owner charges $25 an hour per maid. The other maids on the team tell the audience the circumstances that keep them there: one is on probation and needs a job to keep her kids, another knows quitting would lose her a month's...