Short Changed? Wooden Nickels at the Regionals

Nobody knows better than Joan Holden the difficulty of adapting a nonfiction best-seller for the regional theater stage. In short order, her rendering of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America has had three major productions: Intiman Theatre in Seattle, August 2002; Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, September 2002; and Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, February 2003. Between each production, Holden undertook significant revision. Along the way, Anna Deavere Smith, Bartlett Sher, Mame Hunt, Gordon Davidson, Oskar Eustis, Barbara Ehrenreich herself, and no doubt countless others chipped in their two cents about how to translate the book's sociopolitical content and first-person journalism into a compelling piece of mainstream theater. Judging by the Trinity Rep incarnation, that goal remains desperately unmet. Onstage, Nickel and Dimed is a deadly combination of agitprop techniques and not-for-profit aesthetics.

Ehrenreich's book chronicles her undercover adventures as a wage slave in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota for short periods during 1998-2000. With a laptop in tow and a just-in-case credit card in her back pocket, she took a series of dead-end jobs—as a waitress in a down-market restaurant, a housekeeper at a discount hotel, a dietary aide in a nursing home, a cleaning lady for a corporate maid service, and a restocking clerk at a Wal-Mart—to find out just how difficult it is for the working poor to make ends meet. When her book was published in 2001, it became a national sensation, sparking discussion about the failures of welfare-to-work reform and a new awareness that unemployment is not necessarily the chief cause of poverty. Part of the book's success stems from the breezy manner in which Ehrenreich includes her own story—finding affordable housing, getting a job, learning the ropes, and balancing a tight budget—with anecdotal details from the lives of her coworkers and labor statistics drawn from various publications. While always throwing the focus back on the tough working conditions for her fellow proles, her first-person narrative generates enough charm and a weird kind of economic suspense to make it a page-turner.

In the end, Ehrenreich achieves a tricky balance between the One and the Many, that is, between herself as disguised and dogged author-narrator on a secret mission and the vast invisible class that she has infiltrated. The stage adaptation of Nickel and Dimed fails to find the same balance, and as a result, the play becomes what one critic called "The Barbara Ehrenreich Show." Holden has little choice about including "Barbara" as a character, but she miscalculates the effect of making her both the perpetual, unctuous narrator and the long-suffering, righteous hero of her own tale. In the theater, the physical presence of the actor gives the character a here-and-now dominance that her literary double lacks. As she moves back and forth between emblematic workplace vignettes and well-meaning harangues to the audience, "Barbara" commands and controls so much of our attention that the character seems self-involved. This egoism is punched up by two plot questions that Holden uses to define her protagonist: Can I make it? (that is, Can I summon the will to last for one month in a shitty job that millions of Americans do year in and year out?) and Will I be exposed? (or, While scrubbing the floors of the rich, will I be recognized as the real me, the social critic who writes for Harper's and Time?).

Despite the sympathetic focus on the plight of workers—much of the dialogue is contrived...