"RADIUM GIRLS" A DISTURBING LEGACY
By Chuck Graham
TucsonStage.com
Look at your wristwatch. Does it have any luminous paint on it? Is the watchcase make of lead? Maybe it should be.
The fact is, even today, nobody knows what the “safe limit” is for radiation exposure. In truth, there probably is no such thing as a safe limit, since all radium poisoning keeps building up in every body for one’s entire lifetime.
But because the fatal effects of radium poisoning can take decades to become known, people generally shrug off the danger. There are, after all, so many more things that can kill you so much quicker.
Which brings us to the knuckle-grinding “Radium Girls” political play written by Washington DC playwright D.W. Gregory.
Going where no Tucson stage company has gone before, Beowulf Alley Theatre Company brings out the shameful truth about corporate America’s history for creating a safe place for uranium workers.
Sheldon Metz has directed a cast of nine, most playing multiple roles, to recount the history of the Radium Girls, a New Jersey group of young factory workers in the early 1920s whose lives had no value to their employer, the U.S. Radium Corporation. The company’s business was painting watch dials and other instruments with radium paint. It was the Radium Girls who did the painting.
Basically, U. S. Radium knew its watch-dial painting operation wasn’t safe, but always downplayed the danger.
The play’s relevance for today is that this business strategy hasn’t changed. A string of documentary films keep telling us how giant corporations continue pumping processed food full of chemicals with complicated names that some scientists have declared to be safe.
There were scientists in the 1920s happy to declare radium was safe to work with, too, if certain procedures were applied. Of course that was completely false.
The sad saga of these Radium Girls is fully documented. They have their own Wikipedia page, too. Actually, a little online research before seeing “Radium Girls” is highly recommended.
Much of the dialogue is based on direct testimony that is a matter of public record.
Gregory the playwright has structured her play more like a documentary film, as a string of scenes that generate talking points to move the story along. This makes it difficult to personally identify with any of the innocent victims, but Metz does what he can to dramatize each of the conflicts.
Nicole M. Scott plays Grace Fryer, the radium worker who suffered terribly from radium poisoning and led the lawsuit for safer working conditions.
Bree Boyd-Martin plays Katherine Wiley, the lawyer whose determination kept the suit from being buried under legal technicalities raised by U.S. Radium.
To be reminded of this pivotal piece of workplace history will make us all better citizens. To see how little has changed in the business world’s eagerness to value profits more than the welfare of its workers will make us all better citizens, too.
“Radium Girls” continues in performances through April 8 at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays, at Beowulf Alley Theatre, 11 S. Sixth Ave. All tickets are $20, with discounts for online purchases. For details and reservations, 882-0555, or visit www.beowulfalley.org
