Nickel and Dimed

by Toby Zinman

"You give and give and they take and take." "Something loathsome and servile has been creeping up in me." "Work is what you do for other people, smoking is what you do for yourself."

"Barb" -- Barbara's minimum-wage work name -- makes these various discoveries in the course of a commissioned journalistic experiment: Work at low-paying jobs and find out firsthand how hard it is to get by in America.

First a waitress, then part of a housecleaning team, then a "dietary assistant" in an old-age home, then housekeeping staff in a hotel and finally a "closing shift" worker at a thinly disguised Wal-Mart (which never closes), a prominent social critic goes undercover to sample the humiliation, the exhaustion and the endless worry of 32 million working Americans who are listed as living below the poverty line.

Joan Holden adapted Barbara Ehrenreich's best seller for the stage, and despite terrific actors in multiple roles (it must be frantic backstage with the zillion costume changes), an interesting set by Neil Patel and brisk pacing by director Maria Mileaf, the show simply remains dramatically inert. If the point is to inform us about how rough it is out there for so many brave and exploited people, and how appalling the inequities in our society are, Nickel and Dimed does a good job of giving us glimpses into the world of minimum wage and the shocking failure of welfare reform. But because the show is often preachy and smug, and because it chooses direct-address of facts rather than embodied narrative, and because it badgers us into collective bourgeois guilt (at one point the houselights go on and we all have to raise hands to confess if we hire people to clean our homes), it often becomes tedious, making the two hours feel more like a lecture or a piece of investigative journalism than a play.

Janis Dardaris, Mollie Hall, Paul Meshejian, Michele Vazquez and Karen Vicks play a wide variety of Barb's co-workers with great liveliness, attention to detail and human sympathy. Although I found it a bit odd that almost all of the co-workers are patient, friendly, helpful and kind -- hardly a cross word crosses anyone lips -- that flaw lies in the authorial vision (Ehrenreich's, uncorrected by Holden), not in the production. Elizabeth Norment conveys Barbara's growing desperation and outrage, ending finally with her helplessness to rescue Barb from misery except by returning to Barbara's real life of ease and privilege. What any of us appalled people of good will are supposed to do other than leave bigger tips is left unsaid.

NICKEL AND DIMED

Through Feb. 22, Philadelphia Theatre Co. at Plays & Players, 1714 Delancey St., 215-569-9700

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