Listening to the Voices of America’s Workers

Any street-corner agitator can spout the old saw about the personal being political. Joan Holden’s mission of the moment is to fuse them vividly on stage.

Since January, the veteran playwright has struggled to transform Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” a political broadside that has been a nonfiction bestseller, into a dramatic personal tale. It opens Thursday at the Mark Taper Forum.

At 63, Holden probably has more experience writing political plays than anybody else in the United States. From 1967 to 2000, she was principal playwright of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a noted ensemble that has used farce and satire (but, despite its name, not mime) to advance an unabashedly liberal political agenda. The ensemble won a Tony in 1987 for excellence in regional theater.

Holden has been around long enough to know the dramatic equivalent of a growling grizzly when she sees one. And that’s what she encountered in Ehrenreich’s pages.

For three monthlong stretches during the late 1990s and 2000, the essayist, book author and magazine writer worked an assortment of $7-an-hour jobs in Key West, Fla.; Portland, Maine; and Minneapolis--just to see whether she could keep herself housed and fed on near-minimum wages. The much-praised book documented the daily struggles and slights Ehrenreich and her co-workers endured as waitresses, housecleaners and clerks.

Bartlett Sher, artistic director of Seattle’s Intiman Theatre, heard Ehrenreich on public radio and was astonished at her book’s conclusion: Those who cook, serve and scrub for working-poor wages are “the major philanthropists of our society,” giving their underpaid sweat and their uninsured health so that businesses can reap fatter profits and well-off families can enjoy cheaper amenities.

Sher figured that what jolted him could hit home with theater audiences. He had not met Holden, but as a kid in San Francisco he had been provoked to thought and laughter by such Mime Troupe salvos as “Ripped Van Winkle,” about a hippie who awakens from a 20-year acid trip to find that Gov. Ronald Reagan has become President Reagan, and “Factwino vs. Armaggedonman,” one in a trilogy of plays about an alcoholic bum who seizes on hard, factual political information as the way to de-opiate himself and the masses. “Nickel and Dimed,” Sher concluded, was a job for Holden.

Holden read the book after Sher called. She loved it but harbored no illusions about what a bear it would be to turn into a play. Ehrenreich wrote as a professional observer, a scientist testing a hypothesis. It was not the story of an individual being shaped and changed by life’s uncontrollable onslaught, the stuff of comedy and drama.

“She did not write a book about herself, and a play has to be about somebody,” Holden, a small, self-contained woman with a pleasant but firm manner, said during an interview between rehearsals. “So the struggle has been to give her an inner story.”

Willy Loman can’t just step into more a forgiving life when his bills grow insurmountable and his bosses intractable. Ehrenreich could, and she did.

Two years ago, Holden thought she was through with playwriting jobs. She quit the San Francisco Mime Troupe “in a huff,” she says, not because of any deep-rooted grievances, but “because I had to get mad at somebody to propel myself out the door.”

Mime Troupe plays, often written with other company members, had to fit a certain format: geared to the politics of the day and broad enough to play well in the parks where the ensemble performs each summer. Holden needed a change.

She worked as a political organizer in San Francisco, giving speeches, writing campaign literature and going door to door in an initiative drive to stop developers from gentrifying poor neighborhoods. The campaign ultimately led to a less developer-friendly majority on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Holden says. “I thought for a while, ‘This is fun; this is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life.’ But actually it turned out to be too much like theater: big egos and impossible deadlines.”

Last year she adapted Moliere’s “The Imaginary Invalid” at the request of a director friend at Denver University. Then came “Nickel and Dimed,” an assignment she thought too important to pass up.

Time was tight, and Holden figures she accomplished only 80% of what she wanted by last month’s opening at the Intiman. The critics were not impressed. “Nickel and Dimed” took a panning from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (“a predictable dirge ... shrill and desperate”), elicited measured disappointment from the Seattle Times (“we don’t get to know Barbara much. Her struggle isn’t suspenseful....”) and received encouragement--but not exactly praise--from Variety (“Now it’s up to the play’s rewrite team to render people and events that are as powerful as this idea”).

But audiences were galvanized, Sher says. Attendance ran at 95% in the 446-seat Intiman, well above the theater’s average draw of 80% to 85% of capacity.

“People want to be part of the conversation around this,” said Sher, who is directing the same cast at the Taper. “The piece is about the middle class as much as the working poor; it’s about our audience,” which, he says, for regional theaters typically averages more than $90,000 in annual household income.

The Taper’s artistic director, Gordon Davidson, seized upon “Nickel and Dimed” after Tony Kushner decided to rework his “Homebody/Kabul,” which had been announced as the theater’s season-opening play.

Davidson wanted a replacement that, like Kushner’s drama about Afghanistan, would be “something of some scale and depth and content. But I didn’t have anything in my pipeline.”

“Nickel and Dimed” became “the leading candidate, in principle,” after Davidson read the script. Seeing its Seattle opening confirmed for him that it deserved the slot. That bought Holden another chance to ponder the character of Barbara.

She already has made the real Ehrenreich quite happy (the two writers’ undergraduate careers at Reed College in Portland, Ore., overlapped during the 1959-60 school year, but they did not know each other).

“Watching somebody play the part of myself--or somebody like me, anyway--was quite unnerving for the first 15 minutes,” Ehrenreich said. “And then I forgot about that and was marvelously entertained.”

Ehrenreich has made suggestions but gave the dramatist a free hand: “I know it’s not my product anymore; it’s Joan’s. I expect it to be fictionalized and changed. I liked the script, and I liked seeing it even better.”

She is more apprehensive about a prospective Hollywood version of “Nickel and Dimed.” Ehrenreich said that she has sold the film rights to her book and that the first movie treatment introduced a baldly fictional love interest for her character.

Holden acquired a family during her years with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. She and one of its leading directors, Dan Chumley, have been domestic partners since the late 1960s and have three grown daughters. The middle one, Sophia Chumley, is a waitress who helped with the restaurant lingo featured in the opening scene of “Nickel and Dimed.”

Holden says she doesn’t mind that her work helped make the Mime Troupe’s name while her own remains obscure to the general playgoing public. “The company is famous, and the individuals in it aren’t. That’s not a choice I’d change, because it was a great way to work for a long, long, long time.”

She thinks her political plays sometimes have helped bring about change, not by themselves, but as voices among multitudes pushing the same causes. But “Nickel and Dimed” may be different, she says.

She regards Ehrenreich’s book as the kind of work that might single-handedly transform the way a culture looks at itself. And while she struggles to raise the dramatic stakes for the play’s Barbara, Holden has no trouble identifying what’s at stake in the play’s success or failure.

She wants it to be produced across America, focusing and intensifying a national conversation about the morality of exacting people’s labor without paying them a living wage.

“I feel a huge responsibility,” Holden says. “I can’t do a bad job with this because it’s such an opportunity. If it isn’t picked up and done more, I’ll feel bad, because the book and the issue deserve that circulation.”

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“Nickel and Dimed,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m., Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m., Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Opens Thursday. Ends Oct. 27. $28-$45. (213) 628-2772.