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RADIUM GIRLS

Inspired by a True Story of  Failings and Fortitude



At your factory, they told us what to do.  When to do it. How to do it.
My folks didn't raise me to make trouble.
So I didn't make trouble.
I did what I was told.







Better Living Through ...

Within ten years of Marie and Pierre Curie's 1898 discovery of radium, American entrepreneurs had discovered a veritable gold mine. The element was crushed into compounds for use in countless applications. Cosmetics, paints, tonics, foot-warmers, disinfectants, cookware, polishes, inks, cocktails, tumor treatments—all seemed to benefit from its luminous and ostensibly invigorating power. Far from seeing its danger, numerous manufacturers promoted the radioactive material as healthful, selling radium water, radium toothpaste, radium pads (for sore joints), and radium ointments, tablets, suppositories.

At the same time, as the United States was drawn into WWI, one application could be readily seen as truly life-saving: the application of glowing radium-based paints to the faces of watch and instrument dials, so they might be read by soldiers in the dark.

As many as 4,000 workers in the US and Canada were hired to paint dials, oblivious to the irreversible and devastating effects of exposure to radioactive material. It is a brutal irony that the hands most skilled at such delicate work were those of mere girls, enticed by the high pay and spirited camaraderie of the factory studios, empowered as earners for their families and contributors to the war effort. The most lucrative of business opportunities depended on the most vulnerable of workers.

Half-Life
Though working with trace amounts of radium on any dial, the girls were exposed to enough of the material that their clothing and skin glowed as they left the factory. Most significantly, they ingested the material as a matter of course: the most efficient, least wasteful way to keep the paint brush bristles supple and finely pointed was to wet it in one's mouth: "lip, dip, paint." And, unaware of the dangers of the substance, some playfully painted their fingernails and teeth with it.

When factory workers began reporting painful illness and aches, including loss of teeth and necrosis in the jaw, employers' first response was to deny connection between the work and the employees' afflictions. Further efforts to disavow responsibility included purchasing the silence of doctors, dentists, and researchers, releasing only partial results of investigations, and even smearing the workers' reputations by reporting their illnesses to be the result of syphilis.

Five women in New Jersey and five in Illinois posed legal challenges to their employers. In Orange and Newark, New Jersey, United States Radium Corporation settled out of court in 1928, after years of deferred litigation, compelled by extensive and sympathetic national news coverage that dubbed the workers the "Radium Girls." In Ottawa, Illinois, Radium Dial Company refused requests for compensation for medical bills begun in 1927, until a suit was finally brought in 1937, though the company had moved to New York. The women prevailed, yet Radium Dial appealed the case eight times, all the way to the Supreme Court, before finally paying compensation in 1939.

While the suits and compensation could never restore health to the sufferers of radiation poisoning, these cases were fundamental to the establishment of improved working conditions around radioactive material and of industrial safety standards generally. They are likewise landmarks in the history of workers' rights litigation. And they were watershed instances of press-driven public opinion bringing about institutional change.

Playing With History

Focusing on the conflict between Grace Fryer, one of the five litigants against US Radium in Orange, NJ, and its CEO Arthur Roeder, Radium Girls takes liberties with the historical timeline and with its fictionalized dialogue. Designed for 10 actors to play 30 parts, it is a lively, fast moving odyssey of the many players in the historical drama. Nonetheless, based on the author's extensive research, the play is remarkably true to the personalities of the story, the spirit of the conflict, and the significance of the history.

In this telling, the essential courage of the betrayed girls is primary. Faced with certain death and hardship, Grace's refusal to remain silent and accept payment for her and her friends' lives is inspiring as it is heartbreaking. As her health fails, her friends die, and her promising world falls apart, she grows only stronger in her commitment to recognition and justice, finding a triumphant liberation of spirit in her loss.
At the same time, the willful, self-protective denial of Arthur Roeder, president of US Radium, is as vital and affecting to the drama. His faith in his own goodness and his embrace of his responsibility to his family and his ambitions blind him to his responsibility to the world that has mightily rewarded him. His story is the tragedy of a lost soul, who can only recognize his errors and the damage he has caused when it is too late.

Finally, the casual consumption of radioactive material strikes a 2020 audience with an amused horror, but the play's underlying indictments of our careless bauble- and profit-driven culture are bracing. Radium was a dazzling fad and a marketer's dream. The companies that promoted it had far more too much to gain to be willingly transparent about the dangers their product posed to workers or consumers. The girls who believed their employers had too much to lose to question their treatment--until they had nothing left to lose at all.

Today, we confront daily revelations of a self-inflicted environmental crisis, ruinous food choices, social media addiction, eavesdropping appliances, corporate safety cover-ups, disastrous financial speculations, and status quo manipulation of female employees. Are we, like Mary Shelley's doctor contemplating his monster, doomed to consider the consequences of our creations only after they have escaped our control?

A New Play Renewed

Metropolitan is best known for its revivals of plays from the deeper past, but producing Radium Girls is central to the company's mission: through theater, to better understand our eclectic contemporary culture in light of its historical and cultural past.

D.W. Gregory's play premiered at the Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey in 2000, and Metropolitan is delighted to celebrate the play's 20th anniversary (plus one pandemic year) with its first New York professional production. We are particularly honored that the author has taken the opportunity, inspired by twenty years of regional performances, to re-write portions of the play, with altered scenes and new dialogue. Metropolitan's is the world premiere of this version of Radium Girls, and the first production of our 30th season.


D.W. GregoryD.W. Gregory was hailed by the New York Times as “a playwright with a talent to enlighten and provoke” for Radium Girls, her most produced work. Other plays include Memoirs of a Forgotten Man; Molumby's Million, nominated for a Barrymore Award by Philadelphia Theatre Alliance; The Good Daughter, and October 1962; and a new musical comedy, The  Yellow Stocking Play, with composer Steven M. Alper and lyricist Sarah Knapp. She is also a two-time finalist for the Heideman Award at Actor’s Theater of Louisville, where her short comedy So Tell Me About This Guy was produced on a bill of short works. In addition, Gregory writes for youth theatre and makes occasional appearances as a teaching artist. Her new drama, Salvation Road was the winner of the American Alliance for Theatre in Education’s Playwrights in Our Schools Award and developed through New York University’s New Plays for Young Audiences program. Her work has also received the support of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National New Play Network, the Maryland Arts Council (she is a two-time winner of the Individual Artist Award in Playwriting), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the New Harmony Project and the HBMG Foundation. A member of the Dramatists’ Guild, Gregory is also an affiliated writer with The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis and an affiliated artist with NNPN.

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