By Dave Kempa

Imagine, as a young woman, having your decomposing jaw slowly ooze out of your gums in the form of black pus. Suffering in physical and mental anguish as, one by one, your teeth rot out of your head. There is nothing you can do but wait for the day — not far, now — that you will inexorably die, too young to have pursued any dreams of love or family or travel.

Now, imagine your employer was to blame.

This is precisely what happened to many working young women painting watches in 1920s American factories to make them glow in the dark using radium. Their fatal mistake? “Pointing” their paint brushes on their lips to give them a fine tip.

This is perhaps why director/actress Joanna Johnson so urgently wanted to bring these young girls’ struggle to life in The Artist’s Collective’s latest production of “Radium Girls,” playing through Saturday, Oct. 5 at Midtown Sacramento’s delightfully charming 35-seat Ooley Theater. It’s no easy task to create drama in a script set largely in courtrooms, doctors’ offices and factories, but Johnson and her players take on the task with purpose.

As with so many victims of American industry, the story of the Radium Girls’ struggle for justice in the face of rising medical bills, a latent culture of misogyny and fickle public scrutiny might very well have never been told. But the throughlines between this play — first produced at Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey in May of 2000 — and today’s rejuvenated labor movement, serve as a stark reminder that the many injustices of the American worker persist.

The production opens with two girls — working-class factory workers — at the end of World War I, giggling as they decorate one another’s faces in Cheshire Cat patterns with the radium paint they use on watches in preparation for a glow-in-the-dark prank.

Young Grace Fryer — whose journey from timid teen to melancholy 20-something is captured with balance by Heidi Schuyler — walks in on her friends Katherine (the most important of four characters played by director Johnson) and Irene (Lucinda Otto) as they lay out their impish scheme.

It’s an image of youthful joy overlaid with a danger that only the audience can see. And it’s shattered abruptly by the entrance of three figures of authority: supervisor Alma Macneil (Adriana Marmo), inventor of the luminous paint, Dr. von Sochocky (Luke Michaels) and the ambitious young president of U.S. Radium Corporation, Arthur Roeder (the story’s central antagonist, channeled with surprising empathy by Tyler Anderson).

Radiation poisoning is a slow burn, and so the two-hour production transports us quickly through the years. One of the devices to move the plot forward is the use of two competing journalists whose tennis-like repartee is captured joyfully by Raina Bahadur and Kiyo Romais, each addicted in their own way to that tempting, salacious headline that earns the public’s eye — facts be damned.

We are visited early by Marie Curie, the famed Polish-French physicist and chemist who discovered the element radium, and who, herself, died from radiation poisoning in 1934. Curie’s struggle to manage her English is punctuated with a wonderfully amorphous European accent by Katelyn Monteiro — a verbal tic matched similarly by von Sohocky’s tenuous grasp on English syntax.

As the factory girls grow sick, the poorest and most vulnerable are hit the hardest. The first to die from this mystery ailment is a young Italian immigrant from a large family. Doctors, predictably, place the blame upon her, claiming she passed from complications related to syphilis.

But as more girls fall ill, the truth becomes harder to hide. And a story of bravery and grief, stockholders and snake oil salesmen unfolds before the Ooley audience.

This is a solid shoestring production of a play that carries with it some inherent challenges: how to span a decade in two acts, how to conjure drama in displaying a yearslong (often invisible) ailment. 

Initial productions of “Radium Girls” always favored low-budget costumes and sets, as well as a team of just nine or 10 actors to play dozens of characters. Johnson and her fellow performers are in good hands with The Ooley Theatre’s Managing Director Elise Hodge, who handles everything from set design to production. This isn’t her first rodeo.

One small quibble with the play was trying to glean the class and education levels of the factory workers and their families based on their accent and affect. The script is sprinkled with clues that they might sound like somewhat lower class folks in the 1920s. But, save for a few moments, the Ooley cast largely stick with the modern accent of an educated American.

This does not, however, take much from the overall performance and production of The Artist’s Collective, who tackle a rather large range of topics with care. Enjoying their efforts face-to-face in a 35-seat community theater is more than worth the price of admission.

This story was funded by the City of Sacramento’s Arts and Creative Economy Journalism Grant to Solving Sacramento. Following our journalism code of ethics and protocols, the city had no editorial influence over this story and no city official reviewed this story before it was published. Our partners include California Groundbreakers, Capital Public Radio, Outword, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review, Sacramento Observer and Univision 19. Sign up for our “Sac Art Pulse” newsletter here.