AllStore: Working for Peanuts
What happens when big-box store workers try to fight the Man
In the breakroom of a nondescript big-box store called AllStore, a half dozen overworked, underpaid conscripts bemoan their fate.
Petra, played by Arianna Evangelia, is gathering her nickels to pay for college so she can one day be a poet, while tamping down the expectations of her boss, Blake (Joseph Bricker), who thinks his bigger salary and manager’s blue shirt entitle him to certain considerations from the prettiest of his staff.
Andrea, the object of Petra’s still secret admiration, is training for the cage fight that could pull her out of her current wage slavery. Played by Mikah Kavita, Andrea has had it up to here with the petty abuses and dismissive treatment typically visited on powerless minimum-wage workers, especially if they're Black. She’s not taking it anymore.
As Petra tries to organize her coworkers to fight for better working conditions and wages, we see how management holds all the cards in exploiting fissures in the nascent union the workers are trying to form. Some workers are pulled into management, some are fired, and Petra is left to fight off her boss’s predations alone. Until.
AllStore put us in mind of Barbara Ehrenreich’s excellent 2001 “Nickel and Dimed,” which tells of her year-long exploits of leaving her PhD tucked safely away at home so she can take a series of low-wage jobs: mopping floors, cleaning toilets, flipping hamburgers, and, yes, wiping up the spills in the aisles of a well-known big-box store. Like the players in AllStore, Ehrenreich learned just how dispiriting it is to make ends meet on those wages.
Arianna Evangelia, Makiah Kavita, Joseph Bricker
Written by Evan Marshall and directed by Madde Downes, AllStore weaves together the overlapping themes of economic exploitation of America’s low wage workers, workplace sexual abuse, racial discrimination, labor activism, and ageism, leavened by the budding romance between Petra and Andrea.
Intellectually, AllStore’s themes are spot on, and the acting by the 11-person cast was quite good as well. In places, there was a bit of bumpiness in the stagecraft, for example, as when the actors moved the large props around the stage a time or two too many.
It’s a good play that we recommend you see. Plus, the theatre is surrounded by restaurants of many descriptions.
AllStore plays at the Theatre of NOTE, 1517 N. Cahuenga Blvd., in the beating heart of Hollywood, through April 7th; Monday, Friday, and Saturday at 8; Sunday at 6. Go here for info and tickets, 323.856.8611.
