Hawthorne High School’s Drama Club has already decided on their next new fall play, Radium Girls. The play’s original inspiration is based on the true story of the actual women who suffered and passed away from radiation poisoning. Around the beginning of World War 1 in the early 1920’s, factories hired a bunch of women to come work for them to paint military dials and watches, but soon these women started to suffer bad side effects from the job. The women were using their mouths to keep the paintbrushes pointed like their managers instructed them to do, so they could paint the very small details on the watches and dials.
D.W Gregory is an award winning playwright, she is also the author of Radium Girls, published in 2000. The story recounts Grace Fryer’s lawsuit against the U.S. Radium Corporation. The story starts in 1926, when luminous watches start becoming the country’s latest trend. All of a sudden, the women who paint these watches start to become terribly ill and start dying. The doctors at the time can’t figure out what is causing these women to suddenly start passing away and becoming deathly ill. In real life Grace ended up noticing she had some of the same symptoms that her coworkers had, symptoms such as her teeth starting to fall out, and her jawbone was slowly decaying.
In the play, Grace and her other colleagues all came together and decide to file a lawsuit against their employers for all the damages that the radium had caused. The after effects of the radium had been detrimental to the woman causing them to pass away, even the woman that did survive had life long health issues that would follow them till the day they died. They fought for not only their rights, but for everybody’s rights all over America to be looked after and protected by their employees against any life threatening causes that might happen to them because of any work related issue.
Grace Fryer’s character in the play and real life shows us that you should always stand up for what you believe in. The theme of the play shows us how you should never stop fighting, defending, and advocating for what’s right and wrong. If Grace Fryer had never sued her bosses for ruining her bones and teeth, maybe we would still be living in the same conditions where people end up dying or getting seriously hurt because of their jobs.