From the AQ Theatre website:
Synopsis: a play by Joan Holden (based off the New York Times bestseller “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America) by Barbara Ehrenreich) depicts Barbara, a middle-aged, middle-class woman in search of the truth and hardship about surviving on minimum wage through various jobs and making ends meet.
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: 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, who set out to research low-wage life firsthand, confident she was prepared for the worst. Barbara Ehrenreich’s best-seller, Nickel and Dimed, about her odyssey is vivid and witty, yet always deeply sobering. Joan Holden’s stage adaptation is a focused comic epic shadowed with tragedy. Barbara is prepared for hard work but not, at 55, for double shifts and nonstop aches and pains; for having to share tiny rooms, live on fast food because she has no place to cook, beg from food pantries, gulp handfuls of Ibuprofen because she can’t afford a doctor; for failing, after all that, to make ends meet; or for constantly having to swallow humiliation. The worst, she learns, is not what happens to the back or the knees: it’s the damage to the heart. The play shows us the life a third of working Americans now lead, and makes us angry that anyone should have to live it.
Get more information on the production’s Facebook Event.
Production dates:
October 3, 4 and 5 at 8 p.m.; Oct. 6 at 2 p.m.
Ticket prices:
$5 student rate
$6 AQ faculty/staff rate
$12 general rate
Tickets are available at the box office in the PAC
Open Monday – Friday, 12:00-5:00pm
(616) 456 – 6656
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