A business and scientific true crime story, Radium Girls, a play by D.W. Gregory, tells the story of young female laborers who used glow-in-the-dark paint to illuminate watch dials. In the heady era of 1918 to 1922 in which the play is focused, radium goes from being hyped as a miracle cure-all to being increasingly recognized the source of the mysterious and horrific source of necrosis that leads to the death of the workers using it. (For a bit of context the play is different than the more fictionalized movie. I’m not sure how closely related it is to the book of the same name).
I had the chance to see the play twice in a high school production with a cousin of mine playing a six-fold role that included the vice president of the U.S. Radium Corporation and scientists on opposite sides of the dilemma. To commemorate the occasion, here’s what I found most interesting in the play.
The play effectively covers the way that profit incentive can compromise expertise. The U.S. Radium Corp ran studies, didn’t like the results and covered them up, and then found a different expert to give them cover. This is certainly not a new story, and as ever shows that trusting the scientific method cannot be the same as trusting individual scientists, as even greats like Madame Curie made terrible mistakes and experts with impressive credentials can be compromised. I think one thing the play does particularly successfully is looking at how people of means and credentials can lie to themselves with carefully chosen vocabulary. Payoffs to victims are a humanitarian gesture and not an admission of fault; payoffs to experts would be a consideration and not a bribe, and for legal and I’d suspect self-justification reasons constantly push back against any suggestion to the contrary. The staging I saw avoided cackling villains and showcased the lines people drew and those they transgressed.
The other strong point of the play for me was showing the costs of rallying public opinion to force change. The lead character ends up estranged from multiple relationships because she’s not taking easy buyouts that would ease her individual financial situation at the expense of the collective struggle. The New Jersey Consumer League leader is shown to have a self-promoting streak, but one in service of justified righteous outrage. That said, notably absent from the play was the labor movement, although it does mention that the jobs had comparatively high pay and recruitment from young women in a way that implied that the biggest limitation to their recruitment was the company’s reputation and not a limited supply of sufficiently skilled workers.
All-in-all, the play left me pondering what potential victims of my choices I was failing to look squarely at and what rationalizations and sanitary language I was employing to help me do so.
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