Radium Girls 2025

This show was my first post-college directing job. I chose to do this show in a blackbox style theatre, to illustrate the connection we have to history in the modern day. By keeping the audience close to the action, both the actors and the audience had to question their own places in the story.

I also played with various motifs. We used a raised platform, both to create distinction between the settings of each scene and to demonstrate power imbalances between the characters throughout the show. In the opening, Grace Fryer and Arthur Roeder stood on opposite sides of the platform- a sort of balancing as they begin to tell their stories. Throughout the show, Roeder stays almost exclusively on the platform, and Grace and the other dial painters stay on the floor. However, in the final scene, they switch. Grace now has the power over Roeder, and he ends the show looking up at her- a recognition of the memory, and his loss in the lawsuit. The set designer Avalon Johnson, and I also decided to decorate the entire space with hand painted clocks. All of the clocks were either donated or thrifted, and painted with a non-radioactive glow in the dark paint to mimic radium. As the clocks were suspended on the wall, so to are the memories of the Dial painters and their story.