Radium Girls, Enloe’s fall play, exquisitely captures the harrowing story of dial painters who slowly succumb to a mysterious illness. We follow the story of Grace Fryer, played by Avery Seppela, as she navigates the death of her friend Irene Rudolph (MaryJayne Scranton) and decides alongside Katheryn Schaub (Molly Owens) to sue the company that submitted doctored reports and false claims about the health risks associated with radium. Enloe masterfully displays the story with artful lighting and sound design, and inspiring acting framed in a simple but moving set.
The term “Radium girls” refers to the young women who worked with glowing radium paint for years, licking their brushes to get the fine lines required for painting clock numbers. These women were mostly in their teens and early twenties, leaving school and careers for unskilled labor jobs to support their families. Radium was a miracle tonic, prescribed to treat arthritis and cancers. It wasn’t banned in consumer products until 1968. By then, 100 women had died from radium poisoning. Bruising, bleeding from their mouths and noses, loss of teeth, rotting bone, hair loss, and many types of cancer such as bone, lung, and leukemia are just some of the most common side effects of radium exposure. For years these women lost their lives to radium and were misdiagnosed and mistreated. The remains of these women still glow in their graves to this day.
Enloe’s special touch to this play was to add 13 ghost girls, each of their deaths signaled by the rotating lights on the clock and the gong of a church bell. They started with one girl—who was missing a jaw—and ended with the full thirteen. They each appeared with various special effects makeup looks, bruising, bloody noses and hollowed faces. These ghost girl actors practically had to endure the same conditions as the real radium girls: standing under the hot blinding stage lights, standing for over two hours, frozen- all in the name of theater, and stools hidden in the props.
The tech crew was working just as hard, moving props in and out. Twenty(ish) crew members are ready to move at the lick of a paintbrush, the drop of a discarded research paper, or the toll of a church bell. Lighting and sound design worked tirelessly to elevate the show, coordinating everything took weeks of rehearsal and lots of black clothing. One of the main attractions of the tech department was the Roman numerals on the clock that framed the stage, lit from behind with eerie green light. When a girl would pass, the numbers would light up one at a time before midnight, and the gong of a church bell was the cue for another girl to step out onto the raised platform above the actors. These numerals helped to reinforce the motif of the ever-moving villain of time cut short by corporate greed. Enloe’s production of Radium Girls was just as haunting as the Ghost Girls and was well worth the standing ovation.
