By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
“Radium Girls,” is set in the 1920s, still strikes a nerve.
The “Girls” are victims of corporate greed. They are factory workers who paint the dials of watches with paint laced with radium. They are encouraged in the interest of efficiency to lick their brushes to maintain the point.
They are good workers, the company president Arthur Roeder (Ethan Chou) says, none better. When he says this, he’s looking back 20 years, and speaking to his daughter (Maggie Titus), who is the same age as those shop girls.
She is alive to revisit the wreck of a factory with him. They are long dead. Indeed, most had died before their suit against the company could go to trial.
Is that a spoiler? No. Grace (Whitney Bechstein), Kathryn (Titus) and the others know their fate. It is an existential ticking they cannot ignore, even if others like Grace’s boyfriend Tom (Drew Thomas) and Grace’s mother (Katie Osten) futilely hold out hope.
There is no miracle cure or faith healing, but there could be justice.
The Bowling Green Drama Club took to the stage Friday night in front of a few dozen parents to record their production of the one-act version of R.W. Gregory’s “Radium Girls. It will be available to view next weekend. Email director JoBeth Gonzalez at jgonzalez@bgcs.k12.oh.us.
It opens with Arthur visiting the abandoned factory – he’s full of regret, and yet he resists admitting guilt. He was just a businessman, not “a technical man” who would have known the dangers.
When we meet the radium girls they are chattering, rather casually, given the topic – one of them had attended the funeral of Amelia, a co-worker who died with mysterious symptoms. Irene (Isa Herrera) shares the rumor that it was syphilis, though they’d never known her to run around or to have any sexual relations. It is the kind of misinformation and distraction all too familiar to a contemporary audience, intended to divert attention from the real problem. All of them will come to know the reality all too soon – and suffer its consequences.
We come to know Grace Fryer the best. We meet her fiancé, who sticks by her as her symptoms grows more and more serious. And her mother who chides her for leaving the factory to take a bank job – a move she makes too late.
Grace reluctantly agrees to work with the consumer advocate Katherine Wiley (Terra Sloan) who wants to hold the company accountable. She uses the press to bring attention – wanted and unwanted – to the women’s plight. The importance of the newspapers in both bringing the problem to light and exploiting it for their own ends is as true now as then.
While conceding that Grace and the others are angry, Wiley urges Grace not to show it. “The public doesn’t have much sympathy for an angry woman.”
Wiley urges the women to stay the course. As she predicts the company tries to buy their silence.
We meet a variety of shady characters such a researcher Frederick Flinn (Grace Hauck ) who is really a shill for the company or Dr Knef (Jess Mott) the dentist who treated the most prominent symptom of the poisoning, a rotting of the teeth and jaw bone. For a price he’ll change his story.
We also get the meet the unscrupulous company executive Charlie Lee (Hauck) and attorney Edward Markley (Tyler Thompson). A more troubled figure, also played by Thompson, is the company founder, Dr. Von Sochocky who stepped aside as he learned the dangers of radium – but did not raise the alarm. Too late he tries to redress his failings.
The cast –- which also includes Jezelle Mitsch, Lauren Clifford, Alexandra Parish, Rose Walters, and Reagan Otley – projects through the masks and distances required by the pandemic. The scene design class came up with effective projected backdrops instead of scenery and props.
The cast had to rely on their voices because their faces were mostly obscured. Still, they communicated the emotional nuances of their characters. There’s no denying the emotional punch the story packs.
“Radium Girls” has as much a sense of urgency as play on stage as it had almost a century ago when it was in the headlines.
