Nickel and Dimed
State Theater, through April 17
Running Time: 2 hrs, 20 min
She’s only sprained her knee, but the dread on her face, the tension in her voice, the frantic insistence that her boss not be told, the panic in the air, would lead you to believe that the injury is life-threatening. And in a very real sense it is. The young woman in question is pregnant, her husband unemployed. The job she holds with a corporate house-cleaning service pays only $6.75 an hour, not enough to support two adults, much less a new baby; still, it’s all that stands between them and poverty. She has no insurance, no health care options, no savings to fall back on. If she can’t work because of that sprain, if she loses that job as a Magic Maid, her life – and her unborn child’s and husband’s – will be threatened. Their well-being and any control they have over their own existence would dissolve in a blink.
That moment is one of the most dramatic and potent in Nickel and Dimed, as staged by the State Theater Company. It takes the black-and-white reportage of Barbara Ehrenreich’s nonfiction book about the desperate plight of the working poor in this country and makes it flesh and blood, makes immediate and urgent the daily strain of working a low-income job, the sense of crisis that attends even the smallest of problems. The pain with which Amy Downing plays the wounded Holly can make you wince, but not as much as the vehemence with which her Holly berates herself for the accidental injury and her alarm, rising almost to hysteria, at the prospect of her co-workers telling their boss that she’s hurt. It’s painful, because it’s so clear she needs help, and they’re trying to give it to her. But we can also see just how much is at stake for Holly, who has so little.
As with Ehrenreich’s book, Joan Holden’s dramatic adaptation seems mostly to want to educate its audience about the inequities in our national economy and the hardships faced by those at the bottom of the wage ladder. As that’s a tough goal to structure a play around, Holden has attempted to give the work a dramatic spine involving Barbara, a writer who gives herself the task of working several low-wage jobs and trying to survive on what they pay in order to document the struggles of those who work them all the time. As she moves from job to job – waitressing and cleaning motel rooms in Florida, cleaning houses and helping in a nursing home in Maine, working the floor for a mammoth discount retailer in Minnesota – she makes new discoveries about how heavily the deck is stacked against hourly workers, the constant battle just surviving is, and what she has taken for granted in the comfort of a higher income bracket. As Barbara, Megan Coles radiates enough patrician bearing and diction to appear really out of place prepping salads and scrubbing floors, but she also gives the character an ingratiating drollness and old lefty’s righteous indignation that help us feel this privileged writer is on more than a fool’s errand. It’s a mission, and attention must be paid.
Director Scott Kanoff has assembled a strong, experienced cast, and he keeps them busy, scurrying from character to character, job to job, making beds, wiping counters, carrying trays, sorting shirts. It isn’t always enough to compensate for the dramatic thinness of Holden’s script, but focusing too closely on how Nickel and Dimed succeeds as a traditional play will blind one to its true purpose: to give voice to the people scraping by on $5, $6, $7 an hour and get us to see their faces. Watching them portrayed by professional actors in a cushy theatre might diminish the impact of their tales somewhat, but Kanoff and set designer David Potts have framed the stage with Lesley Nowlin’s photographic portraits of women working in low-wage jobs here in Austin. They aren’t identified – by their choice – and so they stand for workers throughout our community, all the anonymous souls who pour our coffee, change our hotel sheets, dry-clean our suits. After the actors’ last bow, they are still there, silently reminding us of their presence in our city. They are all around, serving us for so little. How will we serve them?
This article appears in April 15 • 2005.