Back in 2017, I read The Radium Girls by Kate Moore as a random read off the library’s featured shelf. It certainly is eye-opening about the callousness of corporate capitalism when it comes to worker safety. That issue seems more relevant than ever, with the Republican party hell-bent on removing regulations that protect workers and gutting the agencies that enforce the rules.
When I originally saw that The Empty Space was going to do this play, I assumed that the play was based on the book. It turns out that the play actually came first, by a decade. I have no idea if the play inspired Moore to write the book, but because the underlying facts drive both stories, the tales that both tell are essentially the same.
Since I already wrote a summary of the basic facts in my prior post, I will just copy it here:
In the period of time spanning from the beginning of World War I through the 1930s, glow-in-the-dark faces for watches , gunsights, and aircraft instruments were in great demand. Back in that time, this was accomplished by using a paint containing the element radium, combined with zinc sulfide. The radioactive radium would stimulate a glow from the zinc.
The radium paint was carefully applied to the dial by skilled painters - almost all of them young women hired for the task. In order to get the fine brush point, the painters were advised to use their mouth and tongue to shape the bristles before painting - a practice which predictably led to the workers ingesting radium. While radium was well known to be toxic at the time, this fact was hidden from the young women - and in some cases deliberate lies were told to them regarding the danger. Within a few years, the women began to experience radiation poisoning, and many of them died at young ages as a result.
In what is well known to lawyers and law students as a common theme of history, the corporations lied, bribed, threatened, retaliated, and fought against all attempts to hold them legally responsible for killing their workers. Finally, some courageous lawyers, working mostly for free, teamed up with the most determined of the workers, and won. Soon afterward, laws were changed to protect workers, and OSHA was created, to prevent this sort of horror from happening again.
The book is plenty long, and has the time to explore the stories of many more women than the play does. In addition, the book follows both the New Jersey factory (the one in the play) and also the Illinois factory (which is not in the play.)
This matters a bit to me as a lawyer, because, while the New Jersey lawsuit settled (as depicted in the play), the one in Illinois actually went to trial, and involved some serious lawyer badassery from Leonard Grossman, who worked pro bono, taking the case all the way to the US Supreme Court. The appellate case actually made it into my law school education on the issue of when the Statute of Limitations begins to run when there is ongoing damage that was concealed.
The play follows two of the women involved in the New Jersey lawsuit against U. S. Radium, Grace and Kathryn (Katherine in real life).
It has been far too long since I read the book to remember all of the personal life details of the various women, so all I can say is that I think the play takes a few artistic liberties.
For example, I can’t remember the whole thing of Grace putting off marriage and then getting left by her fiance Tom being in the book, although I might have missed it. What I was able to confirm from my notes on the book is that another Catherine, who spearheaded the Illinois lawsuit, tragically dying before it went to trial, was in fact married to a man named Tom, who didn’t leave her, but in fact stayed in the lawsuit after Catherine’s claim became one for wrongful death.
Other than that, and regarding the legal and regulatory issues, I believe the play hews closely to the underlying facts.
This particular production was by local theater The Empty Space, which I have often praised in this blog, and for many years. It is a local gem that has been a big part of our lives since my wife and I were young adults.
Making her directorial debut this time is our longtime friend Marina Gradowitz. And by “long time,” I mean literal infancy. It has been a great pleasure to watch her grow up and turn into a thespian badass.
Usually, we have seen her on stage - and she is an excellent actor. If she is not on stage, she is typically behind the sound and light boards.
For this play, not only did she direct, she also designed the sound (including the music), and the set, which I thought was really cool. In fact, so cool that I took a picture.
As usual for The Empty Space, a lot had to happen with a minimum of space, budget, and time. Scenes had to change quickly, actors had to cover multiple roles, and actors had to project without microphones. In other words, the usual things that require creativity and vision.
Marina added a decent bit to the play that wasn’t officially in the script. The most notable addition was in keeping the dead radium girls on stage after they start dying. Instead, they wore creepy masks and “haunted” the action with careful and disconcerting choreography. In a dramatic moment at the end, they take the masks off one by one as a reminder of the closing words of the play, that they were never mere “workers” as their bosses saw them - “I never saw their faces” is the lament of Arthur Roeder - but women, humans with value and worth. And faces.
I thought it worked really well. It was a constant reminder of the steadily growing body count, the price of profits, the legacy of the lies.
The other artistic decision that I thought was good was that instead of having an on-stage narrator filling in the details, as in the original, this was done through “radio broadcasts” - news coming over the airwaves. And it was done with that old-fashioned lo-fi vibe from the era. I loved it, and thought it made the flow of the play better.
I should also mention Ron Warren’s light design. In keeping with the theme, there was a lot of lurid green, but also contrasting colors, done in a way that some really cool shadows were cast on faces and sets. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it was effective.
The central character of the play is Grace, played by Charlotte Smith, who I have seen on stage quite a few times, although not usually in a lead role. She did an excellent job, sliding between the optimism of youth, determination for justice, and grief at an early death sentence. This is a pretty heavy play, so the brighter moments mattered a lot.
The counterweight to Grace is Arthur, the president of U. S. Radium, who was largely responsible for the coverup and the character assassination of the victims. It was the discovery of his lies (and alteration of the report on the dangers of radium) that swung the litigation in favor of the victims.
In the play, he is given more nuance than I recall him having in the book. Not that he is any less villainous. But he is given the chance to be haunted by the evil he has done, and given the chance to have second thoughts.
Alex Mitts took on that role, a bit of a departure from his usual roles as the nice guy. I found it a perfect casting, and one of the finest performances he has done. (And I generally enjoy his work a lot.) From the beginning, I could feel the tension between the nagging of his conscience and the pressures from the shareholders and the reassurances from the company lawyers and scientists that the radium is safe.
In fact, in the play, Roeder actually drinks some of the radium water quack remedies that are being pushed by the corporation. So he himself may well be doomed.
Grace (Charlotte Smith) and Roeder (Alex Mitts)
As I noted, there are a lot of doubled parts, and quite a list of secondary characters drawn from real life. A couple of times it was a few beats before I figured out whether (for example) an actor was a doctor or a lawyer after a quick change. But mostly it was smooth.
I’ll specifically name Corissa Garcia, Alex Singh, Ian Sharples, Matthew Borton, Kiera Empsey, Carlie Wood, and Jason Dollar as holding down the supporting roles. There were a number of others in bit roles, and overall it was a good job. The story came through, which is the most important part.
The vision for this production was excellent, and it was well executed.
It really is a powerful story, and a devastating one. We aren’t that far removed from those pre-OSHA times, and our safety infrastructure is fragile and under attack.
We really should have learned that industry cannot and will not police itself. It didn’t during the Gilded Age, when industry owned politicians. It didn’t during the Soviet era, when industry was owned by the government. It will never put people over profit, which is why it must be forced to, by regulation, investigation, and enforcement from outside entities - government, the press, unions.
Radium Girls runs this weekend as well, so go see it if you can.
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