The Oak Park High School Theater Department performed their fall play “Radium Girls” on Oct. 26-28. The performance showcased the program’s acting skills, production capabilities and detailed set design.
“It was such an honor to play the role of Grace Fryer. She’ll always be a part of me now,” lead senior Mia McCabe said. “The story of the Radium Girls is such an important one to share and I am so grateful that we were able to do that. It was a beautiful yet tragic show and I’m very proud of every single person who worked on it.”
The play is based on a true story about female factory workers in the early 1900s, who contracted radium poisoning from the paints they used for dial watches. These glow-in-the-dark watches were essential to men at war in the early 20th century. As the female factory workers began to fall fatally ill, their accusations against the company were silenced in the interest of profits.
“The story of the play follows Arthur Roeder, who is company president, and Grace Fryer, who worked at the radium factory, which allows the audience to see both sides of the story,” lead junior Jojo Bongiovi said.
For costumes, the show highlighted a range of dresses and suits inspired by fashion from the early 1920s working class. “Radium Girls” featured many costume quick changes with an array of props.
“As costume lead, I was in charge of the creation and assembly of costume, hair and makeup,” senior Abby Leduc wrote. “I am a fashion history enthusiast so period accuracy for the costumes, hair and makeup were super important to me.”
Makeup was essential in the form of victims’ fake bruises and scars. The attention to detail helped tell the story and show what happened to the radium girls.
“For ‘Radium Girls,’ as the girls get sicker, they get paler and sickly,” Leduc wrote. “We had to do special effects makeup to demonstrate the progression of their conditions.”
Before even starting the design of the show, the team spent days researching the radium girls to give the most accurate portrayal of the event.
“One part of researching for the show is that all the actors have to look up an article and read about their character or a part of the story,” President of the International Thespian Society Elizabeth Dusek said. “I played Sob Sister, who is a gossip reporter, so I researched actual ‘sob sisters’ who covered trials and cases in the media.”
