“Radium Girls” closes this weekend at Cultural Park Theatre in Cape Coral. It’s based on the bestselling 2017 book “Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women,” by Kate Moore.
The play takes place in a New Jersey factory in the 1920s, where women employed by the U.S. Radium Corporation painted watch and clock dials with radium-laced, glow-in-the-dark paint. No safety precautions were taken, and since precision was key, the girls – some as young as 13 - were taught to use their lips to bring the bristles of their paintbrushes to a fine point.
With each lick, they ingested radium. Their bosses said the paint wouldn't hurt them. They told the girls it would make them beautiful. The radium became a toy. And the workers, being children, painted their lips, eyelids and faces with the radium-laced paint because it made them glow in the dark.
The company knew for years what the radium-laced paint would do to the girls. But they were making a fortune and the girls, who mostly came from low-income families, and were regarded as disposable.
There were other plants and thousands of dial painters became disfigured and died from radium poisoning. But the play focuses on half a dozen of the young women who worked for the New Jersey factory, including Grace Fryer and Kathryn Schaub, who eventually sued U.S. Radium – not just for compensation, but to hold the company’s officers accountable and exact a small measure of social justice.
This play is powerful, poignant, well-constructed and well-acted.
It is an indictment of sensationalistic journalism, a public that values jobs over safety, and corporations who hide behind high-priced lawyers and misleading marketing and publicity campaigns to cover up risks to their workers and the public.
This is the type of theater that will not just make you think. It will leave a nasty emotional scar.
Remaining performances are Friday, Oct. 23 at 7 p.m.; Saturday, Oct. 24 at 7 p.m.; and Sunday, Oct. 25 at 3 p.m.
For tickets, telephone 239-772-5862 or visit https://0sculturalparktheatreorg.thundertix.com/events/263935.
MORE INFORMATION:
Backdrop
In 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie were two of the most prominent pioneers in radioactivity research. They discovered the element radium, which they found particularly intriguing because it glowed in the dark. “These gleamings seemed suspended in the darkness [and] stirred us with ever-new emotion and enchantment,” said Marie Curie at one point.
After radium was identified as a treatment for cancer, many people mistakenly thought it could also be used to treat other diseases. Before long, radium was widely considered a “miracle” substance, sold in pharmacies for all kinds of ailments. It was also widely believed that radium could prevent aging, and companies sold radium toothpaste, radium cosmetics, and even radium water. The radium craze was in full swing.
Around this time, American inventor William J. Hammer went to Paris and obtained a sample of radium salt crystals from the Curies. Hammer discovered that by mixing the radium with glue and zinc sulfide, he could make glow-in-the-dark paint. His discovery would soon be used by the U.S. Radium Corporation to manufacture wristwatches with radium-painted dials.
Advertisements for the product, which they called Undark, boasted that it was all “made possible by the magic of radium!”
U.S. Radium would also receive government contracts during World War I to produce glow-in-the-dark watches and airplane instruments for American soldiers.
The corporation set up its factories in New Jersey and recruited dozens of young women to paint the watch dials. No safety precautions were taken, and by the end of the day, the women, who had been encouraged to lick their brushes to keep the tip pointed and prevent the paint from drying, would themselves be glowing from the radioactive paint on their clothes and skin.
“Dust samples collected in the workroom from various locations and from chairs not used by the workers were all luminous in the dark room,” reported Harvard physiologist Cecil Drinker, who investigated the factories. “Their hair, faces, hands, arms, necks, the dresses, the underclothes, even the corsets of the dial painters were luminous. One of the girls showed luminous spots on her legs and thighs. The back of another was luminous almost to the waist.”
All along, the company assured the women that their work was perfectly safe. Within a few years, however, dozens of the women began showing signs of illness.
The human body mistakes radium for calcium, so it filled their bones as calcium would, irradiating them from within.
Soon, the women experienced fractures, teeth falling out, and their spines even collapsed, By 1927, more than 50 had died.
They asked the company for help. They really just wanted the company to pay their medical and dental bills, which were enormous. But U.S. Radium rejected their requests. Defended by a team of lawyers and held in high regard because of its position as a government contractor, U.S. Radium seemed impervious to either liability or any other form of accountability.
Nevertheless, the story of the so-called “radium girls” poisoning soon became a national sensation.
Eventually, dial painter Grace Fryer filed a lawsuit along with four other women for damages of $250,000.
Rosie DeLeon plays Grace Fryer
“This role really required me to delve into quite a few different emotions, from the happiness of getting ready to be married to the despair of trying to figure out the next step once Grace accepts that she isn’t going to survive, and even wondering how much time she has left,” said DeLeon.
One of the play’s most poignant scenes is when Grace gives her engagement ring back to her fiancé because she doesn’t want him to be witness to her deterioration and painful death.
“I've had some of my own scares too, and so you try to think about what would happen if you're gone and what the impact of that, of your absence means,” said DeLeon, of her process in portraying the emotion of that scene. “So, in a way, it kind of feels like you're trying to find where the hurt, where the hurt starts and where your character thinks it should end.”
DeLeon is also required to convey her character’s anger and righteous indignation at the way she and her friends and co-workers are being treated by U.S. Radium. For that, all she had to do was take a good hard look at the unfair way workers are treated today, especially Florida farmworkers.
“There's so many people that get taken advantage of and they don't realize they're being taken advantage of,” DeLeon observed. “I mean, especially nowadays, like they're cutting a lot of protections for workers and people don't even realize that that's happening. In Florida, there are so many workers that work outside and they don’t even have breaks anymore in the sun.”
DeLeon is referring to the fact there are few federal or state heat-related safeguards for the nation’s roughly 32 million outdoor laborers, including farmworkers, construction workers and landscapers. Recognizing the absence of federal regulations to protect workers, OSHA in 2024 proposed a new standard that would require employers to evaluate and control heat hazards in their workplaces. The standard would apply to all employers engaged with indoor and outdoor work, including those involved in the agricultural, maritime and construction industries. But the standard is still not in force and probably won’t become operative until October 2027 at the earliest.
In the play, Grace Fryer comments that she knew something was wrong [with her work situation] but didn’t want to admit it or do anything about it. It’s a reminder, said DeLeon, that we need to follow our instincts.
“Even doctors aren’t always right,” DeLeon asserted.
In desperate need of money, Fryer and her co-workers eventually settled for $10,000 each plus a $600 annual payment, although none of them would survive more than two years after the settlement.
Radium watches would continue to be manufactured until 1968, although the safety regulations were drastically improved.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
