The play, based on writer Barbara Ehrenreich’s book of the same name, is about her attempts to stay afloat working menial jobs that hover just above minimum wage. It’s divided into three acts, based on the three locations (Florida, Maine, Minnesota) she worked in, and utilizes a large cast to portray forty-odd people that cross her path in various capacities.

Director Rob Clingan describes the play as a work of Epic theatre, an embodiment of the theories of Bertolt Brecht, who believed that theatre should not try to entrance viewers with fanciful illusion, but should rather shatter that illusion by constantly drawing attention to itself as being a smokescreen. This would be done with characters breaking into song, placards denoting scenes and settings, and having actors break character and talk about the play itself. All this is in service of the piece’s message, which Brecht believed trumped story and character in importance. His works were therefore often polemical and may best be described as post-modern morality plays with a Marxist bent.

Many of these features make their way into this modern iteration of Epic theatre: there’s no set to speak of, just an empty space with six red boxes that are rearranged throughout the show to act as desks, tables, counters, couches, and so forth. They also open up to store an ungodly amount of props. The boxes are there merely to suggest scenery and not distract, which is true of most of the rest of the staging. Two projectors project pictures of work locales and business logos, and communicate information like Barbara’s hourly wage at whichever menial job she’s working at the moment. It all facilitates instantaneous scene changes and, grand notions of Epic theatre aside, helps give the play fluidity and speed, a must for any production, but most important in an already long one as this.

With seventeen actors the ensemble cast is large, perhaps too large; the original casting call was for five women and two men. The only omnipresent character throughout the play’s three acts is Barbara, played well by Cheri Valentine. There are other notable standouts: Tim Hampton spends the first act as Jorg, a sweet, Czech immigrant who wants to learn English, and Katherine Andreasen serves a turn as Holly, a cleaning lady who’s working long hours with hazardous chemicals in spite of a wrecked knee and a pregnancy her husband doesn’t know about. The actors all do admirably well, but the division of roles keeps us from seeing most of them on a consistent basis and doesn’t allow them to show as much range as is the norm in a play like this.

The cast should be commended not only for the roles they play in the story, but the role collectively played in the greater production. They are essentially onstage for the entire show; if not in a scene, they usually retreat upstage and sit on the unused red boxes or on the floor, sometimes for forty-five minutes at a stretch. This is no small task, and they deserve credit for their willingness to do something (by doing nothing) that really does contribute to the swiftness of the show. The two-and-a-half hours rarely drag, and there are some real gems, most particularly the climax of the first act, a day from hell at a “Kenny’s” restaurant; anchored by Jesus Torres’ portrayal of drunken cook Hector, the scene uses a bell, order numbers, the sound of a never-ending ticket printer, and the f-word as instruments in an almost musical crescendo of service industry insanity.

But this is Epic theatre: what’s the point? It’s a question well worth asking, and is in fact brought up directly by the actors in the third act when Marina Lytton (the actress, portraying herself) drops character and goes off on what “bullshit” it is to be doing a play about the evils of Corporate America when we have a Wal-Mart across the street that most of the cast shops at.

The session lasts a good five minutes, and goes on to excoriate not just us for patronizing Wal-Mart, but also the school for funneling $31,000 a year into it, a number on par with faculty salaries. At that point Rob Clingan is practically daring his superiors to burn him at the stake. But unless they retaliate (which they can’t really do without firing him; the theatre department is malnourished as it is) it will be mere self-immolation, and that’s assuming a fire is started in the first place.

The whole purpose of Brechtian theatre is to effect social change; but what change is there to be had from this production? During a talkback after one of the performances the two dominant memes were: ‘Wal-Mart is bad, but it’s so cheap!’, and ‘raising awareness in itself is enough.’ The breakout scene is a microcosm of this strand of thought. It attempts to apologize for the naïveté of thinking a play is going to change a situation the actors and audience contribute to, but is in itself naïve in thinking this excuses such presumptuousness. It doesn’t. If the play is bullshit, as they say it is, then the breakout scene is meta-bullshit.

It was in the talkbacks (or at least the one I was at) this self-conscious streak was most manifest. ‘Hurray for caring,’ it seemed to say, as if mere concern was enough to make a difference. It’s a perverse inversion of Schadenfreude that still uses other peoples’ misfortune to make people feel better about themselves, but replaces conservative “they want to be poor!” sadism with liberal “it’s all so awful!” masochism. These sentiments were near-unanimous, with the effect of turning the discussion into an echo chamber, hence this Devil’s Advocate stance that is admittedly a slight departure from what I’ve written on this previously.

Poverty is incredibly difficult to extricate one’s self and family from, and yes, Wal-Mart helps foster it by paying wages that prevent its employees from shopping anywhere but Wal-Mart, and scheduling hours that aren’t enough to qualify as full-time, but not enough to leave much time for anything else. Yet at this point the behemoth is not a social cancer; it is, rather, more like Sickle-Cell Anemia: an evil that persists because it staves off something worse like Malaria, or in this case, unaffordable goods for the poor; and there’s an awful lot of poor in Coos County, many of them probably employed by Wal-Mart. So what’s worse: supporting a sweatshop, or withdrawing support from a sweatshop worker? That decision is up to the individual, but it is only as good the knowledge that informs it.

To tie this rather bifurcated review together, I will reiterate that I very much enjoyed the production, and that all involved can rest easy knowing their efforts paid off in a great work of theatre. The play (and the book), however, tries to tell itself that one woman’s three month “Prince and the Pauper” odyssey and her chronicles of it are enough. Again: They. Are. Not. This dilemma may be true of any writer’s efforts to communicate important issues, but a play this self-aware thinks itself above such criticism, when in fact it deserves it the most for thinking so. Nickel and Dimed asks for change, but comes up a dollar short.