The plight of the working poor has been a perpetual concern of modern America. John Kenneth Galbraith dissected it in the 1950s. Lyndon Johnson tried to cure it. Barrack Obama has repeatedly demanded that Congress address it. Now, Nickel and Dimed, a docudrama that opened last weekend at the Adobe Theatre in northwest Albuquerque, brings the working poor alive on the local stage.

Led by Colleen McClure as the journalist Barbara and directed by Brian Hansen, an able six-person cast performs multiple roles. Self-consciously shunning anything remotely resembling affluence, the performers act on a bare stage devoid of sets. With only a few chairs and a cart as props, the cast pantomimes much of the action. The actors even double as the stage crew. At one point actors query members of the audience about their own experiences.

The play documents the life of a journalist as she disguises herself as an impoverished middle-aged woman living in three cities and doing minimum-wage jobs cleaning houses, waiting on tables, and working the floor of a big discount store transparently named Mall Mart.

Barbara tries, and largely fails, to survive off these jobs. But during the course of her work she befriends an assortment of other workers, most, but not all, single women like herself. They tell her their stories of sadness and tragedy, illness and hunger. And it's all true, literally.

Conservatives and social Darwinists tend to blame the poor themselves for homelessness, starvation and extreme poverty (officially defined by the government as an income of less than $2 a day). But the working poor pose a different kind of challenge, one that can't be brushed away by politics or ideology. These are people who are trying to do everything the American way. They are holding down jobs, often two or even three at the same time, supporting families and trying to maintain a home. Yet they are unable to make it in the most rudimentary terms because the jobs they hold pay so little they can't support an even barely tolerable life. These are the people profiled in Nickel and Dimed.

The play started out as an investigative article by journalist Barbara Ehrenreich in Harper's magazine in 2000. She expanded the piece into a best-selling book in 200l. Joan Holden adapted the book as a play that ran in New York in 2006. That the work is even more relevant now shows exactly how far America has advanced—or perhaps a better word would be descended—in the 14 years since the original article was published.

If there is still any argument about the need for a higher minimum wage, this play should end it. Although it has been raised several times, the minimum wage of 1968 would be $10.79 today if it had kept pace with inflation. Instead it is $7.25. Recently the nationwide "living wage" movement has led to sharply increased minimums in some states, notably Washington, and is some cities and counties, including Albuquerque and Santa Fe in New Mexico. Las Cruces has put a minimum wage increase on the November ballot.

In one sense Nickel and Dimed seems dated. Barbara pitches the article to her editor as an exploration of a different world, one that seems like a foreign country to the urban middle class. But that was in the late 1990s, during the long decade of prosperity when the country enjoyed full employment and just about anybody could find some kind of job. Since the Great Recession that began in December 2007, however, millions of Americans have sunk out of the middle class, and millions of others are constantly looking over their shoulders at the specter of poverty. Thus in a sense the middle class has joined the poor, annihilating the once bright line dividing them. This, of course, is precisely the opposite of the American dream, in which the poor are supposed to move up into the middle class.

Nickel and Dimed continues through October 5, 2014, at the Adobe Theater, 9813 Fourth St. NW in Albuquerque. For information and reservations call 898-9222 or go to adobetheater.org.

--Wally Gordon