Actors Theatre’s current production of the play “Nickel and Dimed” sent me back to Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 book — subtitled “On (Not) Getting By in America” — from which Joan Holden wrote this stageplay of equal parts social commentary and comedy.

I read that book when it first came out, before it became a boffo best seller among the NPR/Utne Reader crowd, and it struck me as a poignant primer for left-leaning anticorporate sentiment, later fleshed out by weightier studies like Naomi Klein’s “No Logo.” In “Nickel,” Ehrenreich posed as a minimum-wage slave at crappy jobs from greasy spoons to
big-box retailers.

Her discovery: Minimum wage doesn’t cut it. What makes the book richer are the stories of the co-workers with whom Ehrenreich interacts, the true faces of the working poor: Those who slept in motels and cars, the cleaning woman whose pregnancy is at risk from corporate-mandated cleaning chemicals, the folks who’ve found their lot in life and meet it with smiles against Ehrenreich’s thinly concealed, pseudo-Marxist, lefty rage.

Holden’s adaptation, directed here by Kirk Jackson, has taken those stories and trivialized them, rendering them as grist for simple comedy and hackneyed grabs for emotion. Characters are never given room to grow dimension, constrained to rude devices for heavy-handed social commentary.

What emerges from the play, surprisingly, is a different theme than class inequality. As we watch the character Ehrenreich (played by Valley actress Cathy Dresbach) take on each new job only to leave frustrated and out of place (it says something that those she interacts with consistently remark that something is “odd” about the woman), we get the sense that the author was little more than an ineffectual anthropologist, Jane Goodall in a monkey suit. If this sounds condescending, it is — which sent me back to the original text, where I found much more heart and genuine concern than Holden’s adaptation offers.

The irony of presenting a show about struggling wage slaves to a theater of people who can afford $40 tickets is not lost on Holden, who aims more condescension on the audience in the form of easy barbs: Asking us to consider how we fit in the economic chain, hiring grossly underpaid maid services, shopping at cutthroat behemoths like Wal-Mart (oops, here it’s Mal-Mart, hilariously) for the sake of cheaper goods, grousing over tips when servers are paid less than minimum wage. It’s a valid point, but whereas Ehrenreich’s book treats this with softer tact, Holden’s play doesn’t quite have the same patience.

It’s a shame, too, because Dresbach is a wonder in her leading role, attacking it with the same fervor that her Ehrenreich tackles each crummy job — thus earning the nickname “white tornado” from a co-worker.

Dresbach’s five-member supporting cast (including AT favorites Natalie Messersmith and Oliver Wadsworth) is equally solid and enjoyable, smoothly switching between the many characters Ehrenreich encounters.
I’m sure director Jackson knew full well the play’s shortcomings when staging it. Here, against a minimalist set, Jackson allows his performers to ratchet up the comedy and to soften the heavy-handedness wherever they can. But he can’t do much for the play’s sloppy, trite ending, in which Ehrenreich’s wage slaves take the spotlight to give updates on their lives; there, all he can do is slap some sappy music overhead (Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s tender, overplayed “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”) and hope the audience is incited to action rather than merely offended.