Maybe you don't want to talk about money, but Marty Pottenger does.
The Obie Award winning playwright/director presents her newest work, Abundance: What is Enough tomorrow and Saturday night at the Carriage House Stage, Providence. The multimedia piece uses video, slides and stage actors.
"It is very much a play," Pottenger says.
The point of the play, Pottenger says, is people's relationship to money.
And the work is rooted in reality. Pottenger spent three years interviewing more than 400 people around the country for the production, from minimum-wage workers to billionaires.
"I got to see how amazingly irrational everyone seems to be, rich and poor, about money," Pottenger.
The play is not polemical, Pottenger says -- she's not criticizing or championing a particular view about money, simply presenting views that are out there, but seldom discussed.
"The point of this is to talk about our money stories," Pottenger says.
Some people reported to Pottenger they shop when they're happy; others when they're sad. Some said they were happiest when they had little money; others said money was a constant source of friction within families.
"Everyone has lovely insights about themselves and their relationship to money," Pottenger says.
However, in our society, we're conditioned not to talk openly about money, Pottenger says, about how much we earn, and how we spend or save it.
"This gives people an opportunity to talk about economics," she says.
It may sound like a subject suitable for a workshop or lecture, but Pottenger says plays produce civic action, or at least contemplation.
"Theater is a place where big things happen," she says. "People can leave changed. Theater is part of our makeup. The issues around money and the economy are critical issues for us, perhaps more so than before."
Pottenger won Off Broadway's biggest award, the Obie, in 1996 for City Water Tunnel #3, which chronicles the construction of a water tunnel to New York, which she reports is the country's largest public works project.
"I am not making connections for people," Pottenger says. "The connections are already there. I'm just making the connections more evident."
Abundance is performed tomorrow and Saturday at 8 p.m., at the Carriage House Stage, 7 Duncan Ave., Providence. For tickets, $15, call 831-9479.
