Last Chance

Theater

Nickel and Dimed -- The Mark Taper Forum has done a daring thing: putting on a play that attacks the economic privilege of 90% of the people who will see it. Joan Holden’s adaptation of social critic Barbara Ehrenreich’s book “Nickel and Dimed,” about the working poor, is a heady evening, steering us at Wal-Mart-aisle level through the physical hardship, corporate peonage and other indignities of life at minimum wage. Ehrenreich’s irrepressible sense of humor, admirably translated by Holden, softens the agitprop by taking nonpolitical pleasure in a wide range of human behavior on view.

-- Sean Mitchell

Ends Saturday at Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A. (213) 628-2772.