Evelyn Rodriguez at the Radisson (Photo By Lesley Nowlin)
The photos are stark in the way all colorless photos are stark: black and white and shades of gray, otherworldly, austere. Hyperreal in a way color photographs never can be. Some standing up, some hanging, but all of women – Austin women – at work. Real work. One lost among plastic-covered clothing, one alone in the seeming vastness of an order window, one brandishing a roll of toilet paper. Most strikingly, they're huge, blown up, some the size of walls, and their size combined with the simplicity of the photos' composition embodies a single word that seems somehow incongruous but at the same time perfect – they look heroic.
Back in the mid-1990s, then President William Jefferson Clinton outlawed welfare. While the pundits and the social scientists claimed that this would, among other things, reduce crime, out-of-wedlock births, and poverty while saving the government – and thus the hard-pressed taxpayer – money, its most immediate effect was the dumping of millions of women into the work force. Soon thereafter, author Barbara Ehrenreich decided to see just what kind of subsistence level these women could sustain. The result was her book
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, which proved to be not only a bestseller but a bellwether of the times. Seattle's Intiman Theatre commissioned Joan Holden of the political, agitprop, in-your-face San Francisco Mime Troupe to adapt the book into a play, and the result has been produced across the country over the last couple of years and is now being staged in Austin, directed by State Theater Company Artistic Director Scott Kanoff and starring Megan Cole, last seen locally playing terminal cancer patient Vivian Bearing in the State's production of
Wit.
Kanoff and set designer David Potts wanted very much to honor both the journalistic spirit of Ehrenreich's work and the women she worked with and wrote about. "We wanted an environment that would suggest a documentary world," says Kanoff, "and David and I came up with an environment of photographs, very much like a museum installation. Lesley Nowlin is the photographer. She's an Austinite, and I was referred to her Web site one day. She's very young and incredibly talented. She shot an almost unbearably intimate series in a nursing home (
www.lesleynowlinphoto.com ), really brave photography, difficult but beautiful work. So I gave her a call and we got together and we hit the street that day.
"There's a popular fiction that we've improved upon welfare, but the new jobs we're talking about for the most part offer very low wages, few if any benefits, and little to no opportunity for advancement. Here are millions of Americans who work hard, often at two or three jobs, show extraordinary persistence, creativity, good humor, and generosity trying to negotiate the economy and make ends meet. Like Ehrenreich's book, the play marshals her outrage, compassion, and keen eye for the surreal, to show how in many cases that's just not enough. Ehrenreich believes that these neighbors, in fact, subsidize our prosperity, and the play suggests that it might behoove us to consider what we owe them."
"Nickel and Dimed" runs April 1-17 at the State Theater, 719 Congress. For more information, call 469-SHOW or visit www.austintheatre.org.
