These Shining Lives

In honor of Women’s History Month, Billie Limacher Bicentennial Park Theatre is proud to present “These Shining Lives” by Melanie Marnich.

OVERVIEW
This live production follows the four women from the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, IL. The women, once excited to work with this new glowing technology during World War I, began suffering from radiation poisoning and later bureaucratic coverups.  Their struggle led to eventual workplace reforms we deem essential today. (see below for more)

AGES
The indoor theatre production is suitable for adults, as well as 6th grade students and older.
The production is ideal for school field trips.

PRODUCTION
Directed by Jan Novotny
Assisted by Tom Csepregi
Produced by Bicentennial Park Theatre

DATES & TIMES
Thursday & Friday
March 24 & 25, 2022
10:00* am & 7:00** pm each day

*10:00 am
RESERVATIONS EXTENDED
Contact the office for details
bipark@joliet.gov or 815-724-3761

**7:00 pm
Lobby, light concessions & cash bar will be available.
Lobby opens at 6:00 pm.

ADMISSION
$5.00
May pay at the door (lobby opens 1 hour before showtime) or online

ONLINE
May pay online thru Ticket Tailor (no additional charge):
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/billielimacherbicentennialparkandtheatre

LOCATION
Billie Limacher Bicentennial Park Theatre
201 West Jefferson Street
Joliet, IL 60432

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MORE

During and after World War I, hundreds of women were employed at companies in Illinois and New Jersey that used radium, a radioactive element. The United States Radium Corporation and the Radium Dial Company had profitable military contracts to provide luminous dials for airplanes, tanks, ships and the watches worn by soldiers. The pay was good, the working conditions were friendly, and the soft glow in the dark emanating from the women’s hair, skin and clothing was looked upon almost as a status symbol by the working class girls and women who could afford the latest fashions because of their jobs at the radium facilities.

Their Cinderella story soon turned sad for the factory workers who were called “the shining girls.” Historian Kate Moore detailed the story of their long and courageous battles in hospitals against their own illnesses and in courtrooms against corporate power in her 2017 book, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women. Workers at the dial painting factories began sickening and even dying at early ages from the tortuous symptoms of radium poisoning. Their long legal battle to obtain justice from the business that exposed them to the toxic substance spanned the decades of the Roaring Twenties and the Depression-era Thirties.

“It is impossible to say how many dial-painters were killed by their work: so many were misdiagnosed or never traced that the records simply do not exist,” wrote Moore. “Sometimes the cancer that former workers suffered in later life was never attributed to the job they did in their teens, though it came as a direct result.” Moore credits the struggle by the “shining women” that finally led to a courtroom verdict against the radium industry as a historic legal fight that eventually led to the establishment of the U.S. Office of Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). (Tant)

https://flagpole.com/…/celebrating-the-radium-girls…/