Nickel and Dimed (review)

Investigative journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich's non-fiction best-seller about the impossibility of surviving on low-wage service jobs appeared in bookstores just as the U.S. boom economy went bust; her timely account of the three months she spent in three different states struggling to survive as a member of that exhausted and often invisible workforce has brought renewed attention to the problems of low-wage workers in America. Upon hearing an interview with Ehrenreich on National Public Radio, artistic director Bartlett Sher of Seattle's Intiman Theatre secured the rights to create and produce a dramatic version of her odyssey, and he hired Joan Holden, principal playwright of the San Francisco Mime Troupe for thirty years, to write the script. Nickel and Dimed, the Intiman's first commissioned world premiere since 1988, opened for a month-long run in July 2002; before the run had concluded, the company received an invitation to take the production to Los Angeles, where it opened the 2002-2003 season at the Mark Taper Forum. While Sher envisioned an opportunity to focus his audience's attention on working-class community members whose labors, in Ehrenreich's conclusion, subsidize the lives of the middle and upper classes, he was also attracted by the proven dramatic device embedded in the story: a character, disguised as someone else, embarks on an adventure in strange territory and ends up learning more about herself and about society.

In her book, Ehrenreich reports on grueling seven-day weeks in which she and her co-workers toil, underpaid and undervalued, at demanding and exhausting jobs, and exposes the uncertainty that comes with insufficient training, the indignity of management surveillance and the danger posed by chemical cleaners and unsafe working conditions. But she peppers it with a wit that Holden mixes with her own broad comic style to create a dramatic work that utilizes both satire and slapstick to make its points. To shape the book's episodic structure into a more focused narrative, Holden combines characters, embellishes details and invents an epilogue in which workers report on how they have fared since Ehrenreich returned to her middle-class life. The play uses selected bits of research from the book as characters quote relevant statistics in frequent asides, and Ehrenreich's careful reporting of rent prices and hourly wages become numeric projections on the walls flanking the stage. The recitation and projection of numbers that don't add up to a living wage reveal the absurdity of the worker's quest to make ends meet, as Nickel and Dimed is transformed into a performance text whose irony delivers an eye-opening dramatic punch. The script's confrontational style provokes giggling discomfort in the audience during a key exchange in the second act when cast member Kristin Flanders halts the action and steps out of character to challenge actors and spectators about their own reliance on cleaning services; the sequence proposes actor and audience culpability while also suggesting that actors may see both sides, for some of them have had to supplement financially uncertain acting careers with low-
paying service jobs.

To emphasize the fictionalizing that has occurred in the process of transforming the work from journalism to drama, the author becomes just "Barbara," and Sharon Lockwood, a core member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe for many years, skillfully portrays her as earnest and exasperated. The supporting cast of Sanchez and four other ensemble players, Kristin Flanders, Cristine McMurdo-Wallis, Cynthia Jones and Jason Cottle move deftly from one role to another as they represent workers and management, their transformations facilitated by efficient onstage costume changes. Rose Pederson's designs include appropriately styleless service uniforms accessorized with hairnets and rubber gloves, while John Arnone's sets use wood paneling, nondescript office furniture and florescent lighting to provide flexibility for the frequent location changes and...