Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
QuickTake:
The production is part of a burgeoning genre of newer plays and musicals that have mostly been staged in educational settings. This spring, the University of Oregon theatre arts department is one of many theaters taking on the real-life tragic story of radium painters.
Anastacia Heffernan was worried how the blood would taste.
Heffernan, a third-year University of Oregon student majoring in theatre arts and business, had never worked with fake blood in a play before “Radium Girls.” But when she popped the gelatin capsule in her mouth — as her character Kathryn’s radioactive jaw started to decay — Heffernan was surprised. It tasted sweet.
“I didn’t expect it to, because there’s different types of fake blood that I know that they’ve worked with in the past,” Heffernan said. “There’s one that was beet root-based, and that one I’ve heard doesn’t taste very well.”
That’s just one lesson the cast and crew learned while doing “Radium Girls,” part of a suite of plays and musicals that have been performed primarily in educational settings. Due to its large cast and majority women roles (fitting the gender balance of theater classes), “Radium Girls” has been a staple of school theaters since its premiere in 2000, falling in line with the edgy ghost musical “Ride the Cyclone” or TV adaptation “The Addams Family.”
“Radium Girls” may seem like dour material to be an educational staple. The real-life story comes from a bleak corner of early 20th century labor history, when corporate profits were prioritized over the physical health of young women and girls. Those workers’ bones were being turned radioactive by the glow-in-the-dark paint they were instructed to refine to a tip between their lips. The company attempted to stall the lawsuits and just wait for the women to die.
But the UO cast and crew are a slice of hundreds of theater-lovers delving into the world of radium right now. This month alone, “Radium Girls” is being produced in 18 different theaters across the United States: two in colleges, four in community theaters, one in a church and 11 in high schools. Next month, 13 more productions will open, including three more in Oregon and one in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.
“There’s a lot of room to meet whatever the need is of the school,” said Willow Norton, an Oregon-based theater director, producer and arts administrator who is a guest artist directing “Radium Girls,” working closely with the student cast and crew. “For exercising your acting chops, each role is juicy. This is a good stretching opportunity.”
Becoming the ‘Radium Girls’
One reason why “Radium Girls” is popular in school contexts is because of its flexible cast size. There are more than 30 named roles in the play, split among 10 student actors in the UO production.
Heffernan plays five. She made custom online flashcards to know each of her character’s lines, from doomed Radium Girl Kathryn to a member of the company ignoring their role in her death. “I’d put the Quizlet on shuffle, and I’d do a line, I’m Kathryn,” she said. “I do a different line, I’m Board Member.”
Though sophomore Dusty Stratton plays only one character, a rarity in the revolving-doors casting style of “Radium Girls,” it comes with the task of being the narrative’s emotional anchor. The 20-year-old, who grew up in Eugene and was in the Very Little Theatre’s production of “Urinetown” last fall, plays Grace Fryer, the protagonist of “Radium Girls.”
Fryer is the only painter given an onstage personal life, and situates the audience in a front-row seat to the personal toll of being a Radium Girl: being a plaything to the press, fighting for legal recognition while growing sicker, having to call off an engagement neither side wants to admit will end in a funeral before a marriage.
It can be heavy for Stratton, who draws from real-life experience to play a character with a disability onstage. She has postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, a condition known as POTS that causes a rapid heart rate increase when she stands. Her Fryer uses a cane on stage. It’s Stratton’s personal cane.
Stratton said much of the rehearsal work was charting Fryer’s emotional and bodily arc through the legal battle, and seeing just how emotive she could be in weighty moments while being physically weak. In one scene, where Fryer fights with her fiance, Tom, Stratton drew from her own experience.
“We did the scene a few times, and I was like, ‘I’m getting too mad for the fact of how sick she is,’” Stratton said. “She cannot be that mad and then just get up and walk away after because, like, back when my condition was in its worst, I couldn’t even do that, and I’m not dying.”
It can be heavy material to embody over and over again. She decompresses, she said, with a Big Mac and a round of Fortnite. (She plays the video game specifically as pop star Sabrina Carpenter.)
Building early 20th century New Jersey
As a period piece set in the early 20th century, building out the “Radium Girls” universe also required turning to the technical talent of UO Theatre students.
Glow-in-the-dark paint was applied to factory uniforms by costume designers Ali Dittenhauser and Ollie Twitchell. A hold-your-breath-and-hope-it-works moment for the pair came in rehearsal when the house lights went out and the UV light went on, making the paint visible on clothing and decorated cheeks, after the Radium Girls (like they did in real life) painted their faces.
Emma Kirby, a super-senior and the production’s props designer, hunted for period-appropriate cameras in a Springfield antiques store and made fake radium bottles to look like the real commercial products that companies hawked as a miracle. She also found the original documents in the National Archives to print off as props for the actors to hold; when a report on the danger of radium from the married expert pair Dr. Cecil Kent Drinker and Dr. Katherine Rotan Drinker is ignored, performers are holding printouts of their actual findings.
Assistant scenic artist Geni Masson, a senior double majoring in English and Theatre Arts, wasn’t a stranger to painting sets for “Radium Girls.” It was also their senior-year production in high school, though the college production has apparently been much smoother and better funded.
“It’s a joke I’ve been making constantly,” Masson said. “If I had a nickel … I’d have two nickels.”
Theatre Arts professor Janet Rose, the production’s lighting designer, has seen 39 years of UO student productions pass by.
This spring is her last term on faculty. Despite the tough odds of making it on Broadway, the advent of the internet and the difficulties in getting people to embrace live theater as an artform, there are always going to be more theater majors lining up to learn from a production like “Radium Girls.”
“It’s an always-dying art, that’s what all the smart people say,” Rose said. “And yet it’s still here, isn’t it?”
