Nickel and Dimed (review)

Abstract

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.