The Saratogian By Bob Goepfert Feb 27, 2020
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. — “Radium Girls” shows the darkness that can be hidden by excessive light, and the negative impacts of a discovery that is assumed beneficial to society.
“Radium Girls” which is playing at Skidmore College, Friday through May 5, tells the story of how young women employed to paint the faces of watches with radium in order to make them luminous, fell prey to radium poisoning before there was even a name for it.
Rebecca Marzalek-Kelly, who is directing the play at Skidmore College, explains the work is about more than the poisoning of the girls. She says it is also about the fight and resistance the women had to endure to get justice for the hideous deformities and the deaths of friends and relatives.
The heart of the play is the court battle a young dial painter, Grace Fryers, had with her employer, the New Jersey-based U.S. Radium Corporation. “This is a play about injustice,” says Marzalek-Kelly. The time is 1926 and women were not seen as equals in society, especially in courts of law.
Adding to the burden was that no one totally understood the dangers of radioactivity.
It is a claim about which Marzalek-Kelly is skeptical. She says that the men who unloaded the radium were given lead vests to protect them. Women who worked closely with the substance were taught to put it in their mouths.
“People had to have some idea of the dangers. They knew they were placing women in danger and denied their responsibility.”
The director points out that the women had to fight a fierce battle, because no union wanted female members and legal justice was stacked against them. “To even get the case to court they had to change a law that limited the statute of limitations to two years. It was a landmark decision that affects us today.”
Nonetheless, to the general public, radium was a wondrous discovery. Marzalek-Kelly says that after it was discovered by Marie Curie, radium was thought of as a “miracle substance.” It was found to shrink cancer tumors and was used in everything. The prevailing logic was, “How could anything that cured cancer be dangerous?”
She says radium was added to butter and cigarettes and there was even a product called Radium Water. In fact, it was most popular in the use of skin cream to give a special glow.
One of the ironies that Marzalek-Kelly finds in the story is that the job of being a dial painter was a sought-after position. “It paid well, the working conditions were wonderful because the work space was filled with light and they didn’t have to wear a uniform.”
In fact, she says, the women wore their best clothes to work because the paint that would fall on their dresses would give the clothing a luminous glow. With a touch of irony, she says, “When they walked home people would say they looked like glowing ghosts.”
Little did anyone know how the term would become so prophetic. The technique the girls were taught was to dip a brush in radium and touch the brush to the tongue to give it point. “The girls were constantly injecting poison into their bodies,” she says in horror.
Though the story is indeed horrific, the director feels her staging will be a lovely contrast to the darkness of the plot.
Marzalek-Kelly says, “The 20’s were a glamorous era. Better jobs were opening for women, hair styles were shorter signaling an independent spirit, corsets were on the decline and even during Prohibition there were parties everywhere.
"And the Radium Girls were the envy of every working woman.”
For the play to succeed theatrically, she feels it is critical for the audience to be visually enthralled by all this glamor and the potential of vitality that was taken from the women. “This is essentially a court room drama,” she states. “It is important that we add theatricality to the telling of the story.”
She chuckles when she tells how the script, with 26 different locations, says the play can be told with a few tables and chairs.
Skidmore is using a cast of 19, many of whom will be making the set changes appear they are flying through space. “I call it table and chair choreography,” she laughs.
Marzalek-Kelly is a graduate of Skidmore. While in the school, she was a member of the now defunct experimental ensemble Fovea Floods, a group that accented movement in their work.
Almost two decades later, the Brooklyn-based artist has a remarkable under-the-radar career in New York. She is the 2019 Drama League Directing Fellow and a member of Lincoln Center Directing Lab. She’s directed at prestigious theaters such as The Public, BAM, PS 122 and Bushwick Starr.
She thinks of herself as a director-choreographer because movement is an essential element in all her work.
“Telling the story is the most essential part of my job. To do that I must make it visual and fluid. I think “Radium Girls” is a wonderful example of how an important story is made beautiful by light and visually interesting through use of movement.”
Just like dark follows light, “Radium Girls” will have sadness follow joy.
“Radium Girls” plays in the Janet Kinghorn Bernhard Theater on the Skidmore campus in Saratoga Springs. Performances are Friday through March 5. For tickets and schedule information call (518) 580-5439 or go to boxoffice@skidmore.edu