Sponsored by Jerry & Annette Johns

Performances • August 10 – 20, 2023

Directed by David W. Booth

Can a middle-aged, middle-class woman survive, when she suddenly has to make beds all day in a hotel and live on $7 an hour? Maybe.

But one $7-an-hour job won’t pay the rent. In addition, she’ll have to do back-to-back shifts as a chambermaid and a waitress.

This isn’t the first surprise for acclaimed author Barbara Ehrenreich, who set out to research low-wage life firsthand. Her best-seller about her odyssey is vivid and witty, yet always deeply sobering.

Joan Holden’s stage adaptation is a focused comic epic shadowed with tragedy. Confident she is prepared for the worst, Barbara confronts double shifts and nonstop aches and pains, sharing tiny rooms, living on fast food because she has no place to cook, begging from food pantries, gulping handfuls of Ibuprofen and humiliation because she can’t afford a doctor, and failing, after all that, to make ends meet.

The worst, she learns, is not what happens to the back or the knees: it’s the damage to the heart. The bright glimpses of Barbara’s co-workers that enliven the book become indelible portraits: Gail, the star waitress pushing 50 who can no longer outrun her troubles; Carlie, the hotel maid whose rage has burned down to disgust; Pete, the nursing home cook who retreats into fantasy; Holly, terrified her pregnancy will end her job as team leader at Magic Maids, and with it her 50¢ raise.

These characters endure their life struggles with a gallantry that humbles Barbara, and the audience. The play shows us the life one-third of working Americans now lead, and makes us angry that anyone should have to live it.

Cast

Barbara: Teresa Haish

Gail: Jan Booth

Joan: Tasha Yunker

Carlie: Gabriela Rodriguez

Hector: MaryKim Whiteside Hubbard

George: Jason Reed

Ensemble:

John Linderoth

William McJunkin

Aaron Schryver

Sara Hoerdeman

Nina Fontana