By ADIA REYNOLDS
Tiger Media Network
The Hays High School Theatre Department performed ‘Radium Girls’ this weekend at the 12th Street Auditorium. The play was directed by Bill Gasper.
“[I was] immediately impressed by the courage and determination shown by the young girls who took legal action against their employer… the overall messages of greed, worker exploitation, corruption and the resulting grief also captured my attention,” he said.
In the words of Katherine Wiley (played by Alivia Sellens), “There’s nothing the world hates more than an angry woman.”
‘Radium Girls’ reaffirms the struggles women go through to be seen and heard, especially in the judicial system. Throughout the course of the play, the court date for the Radium Girls case is consistently pushed back, in hopes that the girls would pass away before justice could be served. The performers perfectly encapsulated how haunting such a premise is, with especially moving performances by Jordan Aschenbrenner and Addy Brull, two of the Radium Girls.
Oscar Flores also gave a convincing performance of a man torn between guilt and greed. His character, Arthur Roeder, stood opposed to the Radium Girls, though often with a heavy heart. Roeder, alongside doctors, dentists, lawyers, and board members, found every way possible to roadblock the Radium Girls. But though the radiation sickness would eventually claim each and every Radium Girl, the concluding scene asks who really won in the end.
More haunting still is the fact that this play was based on the lived history of dial painters working for the U.S. Radium Corporation. The fictionalized Grace Fryer and Katherine Schaub represent the fate of hundreds of girls who were provided no safety measures while handling the volatile chemical paint. In fact, managers convinced the girls to lick the nibs of their paint brushes so that they would remain precise. This resulted in necrosis in their teeth and jaws and further complications down the line that would claim the Radium Girls’ lives.
Late in the play, Fryer monologues about staring at her possessions in the dark of her room and watching them glow with radium. Such a beautiful image for such a tragic fate.
While Grace Fryer spends the second act of the play repeating the line, “I just want them to see me,” she also begs the audience to see her, too. To witness her bodily degradation and to witness the way the justice system failed her and her friends. Ultimately, this play is a modern tragedy that adapts historical events to tug on every audience member’s heartstrings.