These Shining Lives - UMD Theatre

Performances Glow in UMD's These Shining Lives
Sheryl Jensen
Duluth News Tribune
March 2, 2018

"This isn't a fairy tale, though it starts like one.  This isn't a tragedy, though it ends like one."

Setting the framework for Melanie Marnich's lyrical script, These Shining Lives, the play's central character, Catherine Donahue (Sarah Dickson), warns us early on about the fateful journey we are about to go on with her.

Set in the 1920s and '30s outside Chicago, the play is based on the true story of women who worked at the Radium Dial Company, painting the glowing numbers on watches and clocks.

The lethal effects of exposure to the radium-based paint became even more direct since the women would moisten the tip of their paint brushes in their mouths and then dip them in the radium, repeating for every number.

After years of exposure, the women got increasingly sick as they moved slowly toward their excruciatingly painful deaths.  Denying the effects of the radium, the cold-hearted company fired the women when they were too sick to work any longer.

Sarah Dickson brings a nobility, elegance and luminosity to Donahue, who was one of the real-life "Radium Girls."  Donahue's courage and tenacity in fighting against the company helped pave the way for worker protections.

Lovely character work is also performed by the actresses playing Donahue's friends at the factory: Charlotte Purcell (Grace Kelly Smith), Frances O'Connell (Andrea Leonard) and Pearl Payne (Tolu Eskisola).

Each of the women has chances to shine as they show first their humor and camaraderie, and eventually their horror over what is happening to them.  Charlotte laments, "They did this, and they knew it!  They threw us away for a few watches!  That's what we're worth!"

Addison Sim has a sweet turn as Tom, Catherine's husband.  Mitchell Dallman is convincing as Rufus Reed, the smarmy company foreman who keeps silent, even as he knows too well what is happening to his workers.

Ellen Monzo's elegant costumes are spot on, both to evoke the time period and also to establish the characters' personalities.

Projections are used effectively on several panels to give a sense of time, place and mood through stills, film, abstract stars and constellations.  Newspaper clippings from the period also add power and veracity to the play's themes.

Performed without intermission, the scenes flow one into another with minimal changes in between.  Director William Payne decided to add period music sung by the cast as a chorus for pre-show music, as underscore for some scenes, and during shifts.

While the singing adds to the period flavor, at times it slows the pace.  Sometimes two or three verses are used where one might do.  The music is haunting but there are occasional pitch problems with harmonies.

The strongest of the vocal pieces is the stirring "Bread and Roses," an anthem that came out of the early women's trade union movement.

While this could just be a play about dying, the women's transcendent spirit to support each other, and to worry about those who followed them, keeps the torch of that anthem aflame.