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An interview with the author of the play

NICKEL AND DIMED

The following is a reprint of an interview with playwright Joan Holden from the Philadelphia Theatre Company conducted in 2004.  

THE ACCIDENTAL PLAYWRIGHT: An Interview with Joan Holden

From her home in San Francisco, playwright and political activist Joan Holden took some time out of her work to talk with PTC dramaturg Michele Volansky about the upcoming PTC production and her evolution into an award-winning playwright.

MV: I wonder if you can talk a little bit about your background first in theater and then as a political activist and how the two ultimately merged into the person we see before us today.

JH: Well, they've always been merged.  My background is really simple.  I never intended to be a playwright, I mean, I always liked theater, but it never occurred to me that I could write plays until I got a chance to adapt a script for the San Francisco Mime Troupe in 1967.

JH: That was a very exciting place to be.  In the early '60s, Ronnie Davis, the founder, was really a force.  The first light-show- rock-dance that Bill Graham put together was a benefit for The Mime Troupe.  I saw light shows at The Mime Troupe studio before he thought of putting them together with rock music.  It was this oppositional, in-your-face, very inventive theater.

JH: My husband [Arthur Holden] was an actor in the company. Ronnie was looking for someone to turn this Goldoni play, L'Amant Militaire, into a satire on the Vietnam War, and Arthur said, "Oh, my wife can write!" [both laugh] Thirty-three years later . . . [both laugh]  I wouldn't have written a play if it hadn't been about the war.  And every play I've ever written has been about something I'm pissed off about politically.

MV: From that first play about Vietnam, about the war, why do you think your expression has come in the form of a play?

JH: They [The Mime Troupe] used a scene from the script that I was working on [L'Amant Militaire] for auditions, and I got to go to one of the auditions.  There were people up in the front of the room doing what I'd written, and other people in the room were laughing.  And I was just totally hooked.  There I found out what kind of writer I wanted to be.  I always thought, you know, fiction and poetry, and I never really wrote poetry and I never I finished any fiction.  With plays, I found my form.  I mean, I do write essays, but only when somebody makes me.

JH: My parents took me to plays.  My first theater memory is H.M.S Pinafore at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco when I must have been five or six.  And in the 50s, probably a big influence on my life, actually, was that my mother used to go to the Actors' Workshop in the '50s: Arthur Miller and Genet.  Those plays were political.  My parents weren't Communists, but they were on the left, and the left was persecuted, and these plays spoke to our values, dramatized our values, freedom and free speech against repression.  So the sense that plays could be about important things was always present.  I always felt that theatre wasn't just an entertainment, it was a secular church.

JH: They were public servants.  My mother was a social worker; my father worked for the department of employment.

JH: It never occurred to me not to.  It was mother's milk.  My parents were definitely of that '30s generation.

MV: There seems to be an abundance of adaptations in the world these days, primarily of works of fiction going onto stage or film.  The thing that makes the adaptation that you did of Nickel and Dimed so important and so complex is that it's a work of non-fiction going into a work of fiction.

JH: That's also what made it so hard.  Let me just say something about adaptations in general.  A play is the ultimate refinement of the story or idea.  It's condensed to its ethics to make it a play. Where did the Greek plays come from?  They didn't come up with original plots.  Shakespeare didn't come up with very many original plots.  He tended to steal them.  That's a huge labor in itself. Actually, it's the retelling and retelling of the story that refines it. When it's been retold a few times, that's when it's ready for someone to make a play out of it.

JH: Nickel and Dimed was a whole lot of heavy lifting because it's a work of non-fiction.  There are two aspects.  One is it happens in three different places; she works at nearly a dozen different jobs. And she's a journalist.  She's describing what she saw.  It doesn't need to be organized in the same way fiction does, it doesn't need a plot.  It reveals observations and experiences.  So the first level of work was just to compress it and condense it for the stage, to combine characters and enhance incidents, to make everything count for more than it does in the book.  
     For the stage, you don't get four incidents to make a point, you get one.  So just condensing it was sort of physical labor, really.  Then there's the second level which is it doesn't have a plot.  It has an obvious protagonist because Barbara is the only one that goes all the way through.  But she's not writing about herself, about what her experiences did to her, it's not her main point.  She's not dramatizing that.  So you are left to figure out what that is, and then to find a way to dramatize it without falsifying.

MV: I've had a bunch of conversations and Sara [Garonzik] has had conversations with random smart women in our lives and tons of them have said to us: "that book changed my life."

JH: That's interesting.  Could she have written this book about men?  It takes a lot of power from it being about women.  But I think it's for assorted reasons that somehow this is a story we are willing to know.  We've been subconsciously knowing it for a while.  You don't have to be very conscious to find out that 40 x $6.50 an hour is . . . what is that?  $250 a week?  We've been hearing about the transition from a manufacturing economy to a service economy for 20 years.  It's been 20 years since the Reagan revolution. 
     And since then, large numbers of people became aware that America is being de-industrialized, that the good jobs are going away.  We've learned that poorer people aren't making enough. And this book hit that moment perfectly, just when the boom went bust.

MV: This will be the fifth or sixth production of the play.  I wonder if you have noticed or observed the slightest, subtlest shift in public policy that might be a result of the awareness of what Barbara and you talk about.

JH: Well, San Francisco raised its minimum wage to $8.50.  There is a minimum wage movement.  It existed before the book came out, but it got a tremendous boost.

JH: Should be?  National health coverage.  They're now talking about it again.  Suddenly, it's a permissible thing to talk about. Affordable housing and childcare.  It's no longer taken for granted that big government is a bad thing.  You have people like the Secretary of the Treasury on "Charlie Rose" the other night saying that there are things the government has to do, that there are things the private sector can't do for society. 
     I think that society is swinging back in that direction.  Every time there's a bust and people worry about security, we can talk about that again.  Even if you don't read her conclusion to the last chapter, you need nothing more to prove that we need subsidized housing, childcare, healthcare, and to raise minimum wage.

MV: If we do our job well with the production of Nickel and Dimed, what should be the by-product?

JH: There are totally exciting, full houses, and a year from now, Philadelphia will pass a new minimum wage law.  Get city government there, city council members there.  Really try to make it a public event.  Try and get legislators there.  Attach it to policy questions.  The issues are large and impact lives.