Nickel & Dimed

Like the book, Nickel and Dimed, On (Not) Getting By In America (by Barbara Ehrenreich), Holden’s adaptation for the stage examines whether a middle-aged, middle-class woman named “Barbara” can survive when she suddenly has to make beds all day in a hotel and live on $7 an hour? Maybe.  But one $7 an hour job won’t pay the rent. She’ll have to do back-to-back shifts, as a chambermaid and a waitress.  This isn’t the first surprise for acclaimed author Barbara Ehrenreich, who in the late 90’s set out to research low-wage life firsthand, confident she was prepared for the worst.

Barbara is prepared for hard work, but not, in her mid 50’s, for double shifts and nonstop aches and pains, for having to share tiny rooms, live on fast foods because she has no place to cook, beg from food pantries, gulp handfuls of Ibuprofen because she can’t afford a doctor, for failing, after all that, to make ends meet; or for constantly having to swallow humiliation. The worst, she learns, is not what happens to the back or knees; it’s the damage to the heart.

Ehrenreich’s bestseller about her odyssey is vivid and witty, yet always deeply sobering.  Joan Holden’s stage adaptation is a focused, comic, but shadowed epic. The bright glimpses of Barbara’s coworkers that enliven the play become indelible portraits as they gallantly wage their life struggles. Although written over ten years ago, the play shows us the life a third of working Americans still lead.