Augusta

THE CLEAN BLOUSE Buddeke, front, and Whiteside rock their maid polos.

Photo: Johnny Knight

If Barbara Ehrenreich had written Nickel and Dimed as dark comedy, it would probably look a lot like Augusta. The monologuist Mike Daisey, in an essay in Seattle’s Stranger earlier this month, pointed out the irony of the glut of regional theater productions of the play based on Ehrenreich’s book: wealthy institutions paying poor actors to play poor maids for wealthy audiences in a show about a wealthy woman slumming it.

There’s something of Ehrenreich’s well-meaning liberal dilettantism in Dresser’s play as well. Molly, a middle-age employee of a cleaning service, gets a new partner in Claire, a smart-mouth twentysomething. The two develop an uneasy alliance over the course of a summer spent cleaning and recleaning the enormous home of their single client (a wealthy widow who’s never seen), parrying the thrusts of their new manager (an ambitious corporate stooge named Jimmy) and talking—a lot—about how hard it is to be a wage slave.

Like Nickel and Dimed, Augusta comes across as a story about being poor by a writer who doesn’t know what it’s like to be poor: well intentioned but kind of embarrassing. There are tonal problems with the clash of the snarky and the sincere; the mashup of class commentary and corporate satire (in Kross’s scene-stealing performance, Jimmy comes across as a menacing cousin of Michael Scott) confuses things as well. All three actors are appealing, but neither their attempts nor Dunn’s clunky staging can stop Dresser’s issues from nickel-and-diming the play to death.