by Bradley Stephenson
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre
Volume 28, Number 2 (Spring 2016)
ISNN 2376-4236
©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
D.W. Gregory’s most famous and most produced play is Radium Girls (2003), which dramatizes the story of several young women from Orange, New Jersey who developed radium poisoning as a result of their employment with the U.S. Radium Corporation during the late 1910s and early 1920s.[1] The girls were dial painters, whose delicate fingers were required to paint watch dials with radium-laced, glow-in-the-dark paint. The story was the subject of Claudia Clark’s 1997 book, Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935, which provided Gregory with much of the historical context for her play.[2] Scientific progress created a new industry of radium-based glow in the dark paint, yet the material consequences of those labor practices were poorly understood. The dial painters’ fight for justice was one of the first instances in the United States of a corporation being held legally responsible for the safety and well-being of its employees.
Gregory’s Radium Girls focuses on the experiences of Grace Fryer, one of the original dial painters and a key plaintiff in the case against the U.S. Radium Corporation. The play takes place between 1918 and 1928, encompassing the time from when the women began getting ill to the settlement of their case. The radium poisoning suffered by the workers resulted in bone loss, debilitating pain, loss of physical mobility, and eventually death. At the start of the play, Grace is a plucky fifteen year old girl working as a dial painter. As her friends begin getting sick and dying, the girls’ quest to uncover the truth of the mysterious illness, and the corporation’s quest to hide the truth, slam against each other in a “cinematic, briskly-paced,” highly theatrical style.[3] The play utilizes many facets of Brecht’s epic theatre, including historicization and the juxtaposition of comic, presentational scenes with more serious, naturalistic ones, simultaneously calling attention to the politicized nature of the content while emphasizing the theatricality and performative nature of the play itself. Despite the authorial instructions for this kind of stylized simplicity, the play is often over-produced with elaborate theatrical sets and costumes, larger casts, and attempts at historical realism that run counter to the playwright’s stylistic intent. I have seen a similarly over-produced production, and the pace slowed down significantly, resulting in a grim and tedious performance that lost the “descriptive simplicity and graphic candor” noted by Robert Daniels in his Variety review of the original production workshop at the Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey in 2000.[4] Despite a tendency towards elaborate production style and grim tone, the play still has great potential, if understood and handled properly, to make possible the transformation of actors’ and audiences’ intra-acting bodies.
The labor practices dramatized in the play were born from scientific discoveries that opened up many new possibilities, products, and potentials for profit. The story itself may be novel to some readers, but the battle of the individual versus the corporate entity, enflamed by the media, is hardly new. The debilitating physical ramifications that resulted from the interaction of bodies and radioactive particles provide a fascinating avenue of inquiry which opens up new possibilities for understanding bodies, plays, performance, and the nature of life itself. Using a variety of disability theories in the analytical foreground of a close reading of the play, this essay suggests how accounting for the interactions of scientific materialities with diverse bodies in historical and performative realities can transform the way we see our intra-acting bodies in the world, and the world in our bodies.[5]
It is pertinent to ask the extent to which the Radium Girls should be considered disabled subjects. Does chronic illness fall under the umbrella of Disability? Do they start out sick and then become disabled at a certain point? Is disability itself just a social construct that is more about institutions and obstacles than bodies and capacities?[6] For the purposes of this essay, it is helpful to resituate notions of disability away from the binary of disabled vs. non-disabled. Jasbir K. Puar reframes disability more as a spectrum or “an interdependent relationship between bodily capacity and bodily debility.”[7] She uses the concept of “slow death” in a robust theorization of debility and queer sexuality that exposes the capitalist ramifications of non-normative bodies in a contemporary context:
Capacity and debility are seeming opposites generated by increasingly demanding neoliberal formulations of health, agency, and choice [that generate] population aggregates. Those “folded” into life are seen as more capacious or on the side of capacity, while those targeted for premature or slow death are figured as debility. Such an analysis re-poses the questions: which bodies are made to pay for “progress”? Which debilitated bodies can be reinvigorated for neoliberalism, and which cannot?[8]
From this perspective, the ramifications for the Radium Girls are significant, both historically and within the play. Are their lives and bodies the cost of scientific progress and knowledge? Can their decaying bodies be made useful to society? Their “slow death” is certainly useful to the media industry that is always intervening to get exclusive rights and sell papers in the play. Debility can be very profitable to capitalism, and so is the demand to “recover” from or overcome it.[9] It is no coincidence that the character who spearheads Grace’s public campaign and is her most powerful ally, Katherine Wiley, is the executive director of the New Jersey Consumer’s League. Wiley says in her speech to a crowd of onlookers near the end of the first act, “We do not have to accept injustice. We can use our powers as consumers to influence the practices of those who would wish to profit from our patronage.”[10] In Radium Girls, this slow death and the desire to recover from it are closely related to ideas of consumerism and scientific progress. The power to purchase the products of these scientific advances ultimately provides the key to coercing corporations into accepting responsibility for the safety of their workers.
Early in the twentieth century, radium was seen as a scientific miracle and cure-all. The discovery of radium facilitated the development of nuclear medicine and radiation therapy as a cancer treatment. Radium was also commercially popularized and used in hundreds of quack remedies and natural tonics from radioactive water to cigarettes to suppositories and bath salts.[11] A notable example of these quack cures receives some prominent product placement in the play. Radithor was a famous patent medicine that was manufactured in Orange, New Jersey, at the same time as the events of the play. Its inventor, William J. A. Bailey, makes an appearance in the play – giving out free samples and basking in the media attention of his business successes – that comes off to contemporary audiences more like an infomercial than a news reel. He says, “Radioactivity is one of the most remarkable agents in medical science. I drink Radithor myself and I can vouch for its power.”[12] This idea of the agency of the radium itself can provide an interesting avenue of exploration that can deepen our understanding of labor and disabled bodies within the play and within the wider fields of science studies and disability studies.
Radithor famously contributed to the death of the wealthy New England socialite Eben Byers in 1932. Ron Winslow’s headline for his article recounting the event in the August 1, 1990, issue of The Wall Street Journal was “The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off.” In the play, even the complex antagonist Arthur Roeder, president of U.S. Radium Corporation, is convinced of the healing powers of radium, and he unquestioningly consumes Radithor daily with his wife: “Diane! I have documents—I have articles—People with tumors the size of baseballs. Radium therapy—the tumors disappear. Diane. […] We save lives. We make lives better—mild radium therapy—invigorates. You can’t really think I’m a liar.”[13] Roeder’s trust and naïveté, shared by the real-life Eben Byers, are symptomatic of a world view that relegates physical matter to mere objects, without agency or action, a product to be manufactured, sold, exploited, and utilized. But radium will not remain a passive object to be manipulated. Radium is an actor that responds.
In Mel Chen’s groundbreaking 2012 book, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, she re-theorizes notions of animacy as an “often racialized and sexualized means of conceptual and affective mediation between human and inhuman, animate and inanimate, whether in language, rhetoric, or imagery.”[14] Chen’s work brings notions of agency and sentience to nonlife as well as life. “Animacy is built on the recognition that abstract concepts, inanimate objects, and things in between can be queered and racialized without human bodies present, quite beyond questions of personification.”[15] From this perspective, inanimate atoms are both actants and actors with which human beings must reckon. In this way, radium itself becomes an actor and character in the play.
The opening scene of the young girls giggling and painting their teeth and faces with radioactive paint takes on new meaning if one considers the radium-laced paint to have its own animacy. As a joke, the girls turn off the lights to scare their supervisor, and “their faces [glow] like jack-o’-lanterns in the dark. A scream, laughter, and the lights go up again.”[16] No longer just a childish school girl prank, the scene takes a much more sinister tone. Many audiences are probably already primed for this response, if they have any knowledge of the story or the nature of radioactive material. In a sense, Gregory is already capitalizing on the theatricality of animacy. In the theatre, objects and bodies tend to be endowed with meaning and action that always have forward motion. The opening scene with the painted faces not only characterizes the girls and their relationships; it also propels the play forward towards its inevitable conclusion. The presence of the toxic radium necessarily influences that trajectory and adds multiple shards of meaning to the action. Moving from the metaphor of the toxic to the actual toxic creates “rapidly multiplying meanings.”[17] Like the radium-laced paint in the first scene, the Radithor that the Roeders consume on stage thus becomes a new character, an actor with significant impact on the outcome of the story and the lives of the other players.
What then should be made of this silent character, this toxic and invisible but always active radium, and how does Gregory account for this toxic activity in the play? Chen says that “Toxicity straddles boundaries of ‘life’ and ‘nonlife,’ as well as the literal bounds of bodies, in ways that introduce a certain complexity to the presumption of integrity of either lifely or deathly subjects.”[18] While Chen’s theorization of toxicity is robust, she relies on a boundaried binary concept of living and non-living in her theory of toxicity. In the play, Grace’s fiancé, Tom Krieder, tries to deny what he calls “this in-between life” of Grace’s radioactive debility, yet his words betray an unconscious recognition that radioactive disability seems to defy the life-nonlife binary in several crucial, and theatrical, ways.[19] Like many great characters from the history of theatre, radioactive atoms are unstable and project parts of themselves outwards, projections that can create dramatic chain reactions. Radioactive atoms have a strong objective, to attain stability. Like the minds of these characters created from words on a page, radioactive atoms have a life of their own that attracts analysis, to more fully understand the mysterious inner workings deep inside them. While this radium-as-character analogy is far from perfect, through it one can explore how Chen’s complex presumptions of integrity are realized and dramatized on multiple levels: nuclear, personal, performative, and theoretical. A fuller account of radioactivity can thus help problematize the life-nonlife binary, illuminate Radium Girls and other dramatic forms, and also enrich our notions of lives, non-lives, and half-lives, of ability and debility.
In an article in the journal Nature, J. Rondo describes radium as an example of the “long-lived bone-seeking radio-elements.”[20] Rondo’s 1969 meta-analysis gathers data from multiple studies from the 1950s and earlier that tried to describe the “biological half-life” of radium, i.e., how long it takes half of the radium to leave the human body once it has been taken in. While radium’s biological half-life is not precisely identified, somewhere around 15-28 years, its radioactive half-life is well known: 1601 years. Radioactive half-life refers to the amount of time it takes for half of the atoms in a given sample of radioactive material to undergo nuclear decay. So, after one half-life of time, there will be 50% of the original amount of radioactive material remaining; after two half-lives there will be 25% less; after three, 12.5%; and so on. To give some perspective on the activity of radium, its half-life is relatively short, about 1601 years, yet radium is almost three million times more radioactive than uranium-238, with a half-life of about 4.5 billion years. What is most interesting about these facts is not the numbers, but the language that science uses to describe the element. Radioactive elements have “life” (or at least “half-life”) as part of their definitive natures. This half-living nature of radioactive matter in general, and radium in particular, complicates conceptions of life and non-life that go beyond biology and chemistry and raises significant ontological questions that are explored in the play.
Many news articles referred to (or spectacularized) the Radium Girls as “The Living Dead.” Taking up a third of the page above a photo of a frail woman being comforted by other women, the headline of the February 11, 1938 edition of the Chicago Daily Times reads “‘Living Death’ Quiz at Bedside.”[21] These girls are not dead yet, but they are no longer fully living. As Chen might say, the presumption of their “lifely” physical integrity is in question.[22] In the play, the Radium Girls also become associated with death while still alive. “That girl is still staring at me,” Roeder says at the trial. “She looks like death, Edward.” To which his lawyer, Edward Markley, replies, “They all look like death, Arthur.”[23] Even the Sob Sister, who usually pulls at the public’s sentimental heart strings, can’t help having a moment of glee at how many papers she will sell because of the girls’ ultimate demise.
REPORTER: Radium Girls Go to Court Today!
SOB SISTER: Radium Girls Knock at the Doors of Justice! Will they be heard?
REPORTER: These poor, injured girls face pain!
SOB SISTER: Disfigurement!
REPORTER: Ruin!
SOB SISTER: (cheerfully) And death! […] Read it in the Graphic! We care. Because you care.[24]
As described above, radium is a “bone-seeking” element, due in part to its chemical similarities with calcium. When introduced to a biological system, radium becomes a kind of living actor with two objectives: to seek bone and settle there, and to seek nuclear stability by emitting alpha particles and gamma rays.[25]
Ironically, just as life is made less-living by the addition of the half-life agency of radium, death is made more “lifely” as a result of the same. In Radium Girls, after the medical examiner exhumes the remains of Amelia Maggia, the first Radium Girl to die, the body (particularly the lower and upper jaws and the lumbar vertebrae) is found to be highly radioactive with no evidence of syphilis, initially said to be the cause of death. The Sob Sister and Reporter jump in immediately: “Body is Radioactive!” “Bones of Dead Girl Kick Off Gamma Rays!”[26] Even in death, the radium still lives. Conjuring images of the Valley of Dry Bones from Ezekiel chapter 37, the radium-infused bones are still kicking off gamma rays. It is as if the toxicity of the radium prevents life from being just life, and death from being just death. The interactions of radium and bodies will always be more than the binary of life and nonlife. Likewise, as Tom says in regard to Grace’s growing debility, disability itself can be thought of as a kind of “in-between life.” People with disabilities are often viewed as “less than” or lacking some aspect of “normalcy”, a kind of half-life to be anxious about. But what if, instead of this ableist perception of defective otherness, one thought of the “half-life” of disability in this more transcendent sense of an agency that brings something more to one’s existence, something that would not be possible or conceivable without the intersection of life and half-life, of ability with debility? For there is always an intermingling of ability with disability along the spectrum of our existence.
There is something about the interactions of the agency of radioactivity and the agency of biological bodies that changes the very nature of materiality, agency, and life itself. In the case of the Living Dead Girls, the merging of life with half-life brings about an association with non-life. Conversely, in the case of Maggia’s exhumed jawbone, the blending of death with half-life evokes a kind of liveliness, kicking off gamma rays. Bodies and atoms are intertwined and interacting in ways that transcend the physical and the phenomenological. Stacy Alaimo’s theory of “trans-corporeality” emphasizes this interconnectedness of human bodies with the more-than-human world. Trans-corporeality looks at the “flows of substances” and theorizes “the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors.”[27] This hermeneutic approach can “account for the ways in which nature, the environment, and the material world itself signify, act upon, or otherwise affect human bodies, knowledges, and practices,” thus necessitating broader ways of thinking about the world, bodies, environments, and materiality.[28] Seen in this way, Radium Girls becomes a potent example of trans-corporeal space, “in which the body can never be disentangled from the material world.”[29] The simple cause-and-effect approach to understanding the debilitating effects of radium poisoning begins to break down in favor of a more inclusive understanding of intra-acting agencies. Thus, the debilities of the Radium Girls are no longer understood as additions to or deletions from a ‘normal’ body. Rather, bodies and lives exist on a spectrum possessing various degrees of half-life that are always already relational, a kind of “intra-active becoming” that is “always the very substance of ourselves.”[30] Thus, Gregory’s depiction of Grace Fryer is not so much an image of the progression of a disabled object, but rather an image of a new way of understanding bodies, abilities, and the intra/inter-actions of the material world. These new ways of understanding are played out most concretely in the way the play explores early twentieth century labor practices and the stylized representations of disability on stage.
Radium Girls is set during the same time frame of the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. Tamsen Wolff has argued a connection between theatre and the eugenics movement, noting how both dramatists and eugenicists are concerned with visibility and truth:
In eugenic theory, there is a vital tension between hidden truth […] and visible truth. […] For eugenicists, this tension creates a vacillation between an assurance about what can be seen on the body and an uneasiness about what lurks unseen in the body. Of course, in theatre, a tension between hidden truth and visible truth is not only a playwright’s natural playground, but is relevant to everything from the body of the performer, to dramatic form, to stage design, to the role of the audience.[31]
Wolff’s argument explores how theatre was historically and politically used as a means of indoctrinating people into a eugenic way of thought. Some veins of scientific research at the time were working towards the goal of perfecting the human race, or rather, the elimination of those individuals who did not match the traits deemed desirable by certain authority figures. This eugenic obsession with appearances contributed to twentieth century atrocities such as forced sterilization, genocide, and xenophobic world wars. Although Radium Girls does not operate as a polemic for eugenic examination (as the plays analyzed by Wolff do), it nevertheless capitalizes on the same tension between visible and invisible truth in dynamic trans-corporeal ways that challenge rather than reify able-bodied understandings of performer, audience, and the world as a whole.
Radium Girls’ central themes include the “peculiarly American obsessions with health, wealth, and the commercialization of science.”[32] This commercialization of science includes the girls wanting compensation and treatment for their acquired disability, their dentist extorting funds from the company and the girls, and the marketing exploits of various entrepreneurs and quack scientists portrayed in the play. This obsession is intrinsically related to notions of capital and labor, and Radium Girls provides an interesting exploration of pre-Social Security ideas regarding disability and the wage-labor system. Even though the Social Security Administration was not founded until 1935, seven years after the events of the play end, disability was not added as an insured contingency to the social security program until the 1950s.[33] In her book The Disabled State, Deborah Stone asserts that the idea of a ‘welfare state’ is founded on “the principle that certain characteristics – youth, old age, widowhood, and sickness – render people automatically incapable of participating in the wage-labor system.”[34] Though welfare programs were common in other industrialized nations around the world, the United States had not adopted any such program during the time of the Radium Girls scandal. The idea that there were any “categorical exemptions from the labor market” had not yet taken popular hold in the American psyche.[35] The beginning of act two provides an interesting perspective on these notions of labor and fitness:
REPORTER: December 4, 1927! Jack Youngwood reporting for the Newark Ledger.
SOB SISTER: Nancy Jane Harland for the New York Graphic!
REPORTER: On the strange case of the Radium Girls.
SOB SISTER: Who claim they were poisoned at the hands of their employer.
REPORTER: And now seek their day in court!
SHOPGIRL: Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
SOB SISTER: That’s the price tag on their suffering!
MALE SHOPPER: Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars!
STORE OWNER: Ask me, it’s all a sham!
CUSTOMER: What do you mean? Those girls are very sick!
STORE OWNER: Sicka workin’, sure!
REPORTER: Doctors say… the Radium Girls have only a year to live![36]
Here Gregory presents the Store Owner, the lone representative of hard work and entrepreneurship, in a sea of consumers flanked by media representatives, all questioning the validity of the girls’ claims. He thinks they just want a handout; therefore they must be lying. Stone notes how disability has so often been historically associated with deception, and therefore the very concept of disability is predicated on the need to prove its validity.[37] For the freak shows common to traveling entertainments at this time, that expertise was doled out by the hawking ‘professors’ and ‘anthropologists’ guaranteeing that the exhibits were indeed authentic. It was the medical doctor alone who could validate ‘legitimate disability.’ Disability had become a clinical concept.[38] In this scene, the Reporter trumps the entire debate about the ‘validity of the invalids’ by invoking the claims of the almighty “doctors.” As the eugenicists proposed, science appears to have the final say over the nature and ‘normalcy’ of atypical bodies.
Gregory, however, is not content merely to portray this shift in perspective towards the medical model of understanding disability in Radium Girls.[39] On the contrary, she carefully chips away at the hegemony of the scientific medical industrial complex by challenging this assumed authority. The character of Dr. Knef, the opportunistic dentist, represents not only corruption and the medical gaze that continues to enfreak and marginalize people with disabilities, but also the capitalistic gaze that permeates the play. Even though characters like Dr. Knef explore the darker side of medical politics in the quid pro quo (he trades false diagnoses for corporate payments), the play is not simply satirizing a corrupt medical professional. Rather, Gregory takes a broader and more oppositional position to the part that the medical profession plays in the hegemonic authority that denies the visibility of the disabled, and indeed would deny the very existence of the trans-corporeal. It is the character of Grace with her unwillingness to accept the status quo that helps move the play beyond simply villainizing Knef and his ilk and into this more subversive and challenging arena. Early in the play, when news reaches the dial painters that the death of their friend and fellow dial painter, Amelia Maggia, was attributed to complications from syphilis, Grace challenges the decree, and Kathryn hesitantly follows suit.
GRACE: But Amelia was ever so nice.
IRENE: Guess she got around more than we knew.
GRACE: Maybe it’s a mistake. Maybe the doctor got it wrong.
IRENE: Come on.
GRACE: He coulda got it wrong. Doctors are wrong sometimes.
KATHRYN: That’s true. Doctor was wrong about Aunt Ivy.
IRENE: What’s Mama got to do with it? KATHRYN: Irene, don’t you remember? Up to the day she died, doctor said Aunt Ivy would be fine. Said take a cup a tea, get a good night’s rest. And two days later we was taking her to Rosedale cemetery.[40]
By beginning to question the infallibility of scientific ‘doctor’s orders’, the girls also begin to take a stand against the company and file suit at the end of act one. However, when another dial painter, Kathryn, also takes ill and is waiting for surgery in the hospital, her resolve fails. Faced with her own acquired toxic debility, Kathryn turns back to the doctors for refuge from her fears and loses resolve in the legal battle, leaving Grace the lone soldier in her quest for justice:
KATHRYN: (abruptly). What if we don’t win?
GRACE: ‘Course we’ll win.
KATHRYN: But what if we don’t? My father will lose his house. We’ll be on the street. You’ll be on the street, too. Yer father must owe thousands. And you and Tom, You won’t never get married. How can ya stand it, Grace—
GRACE: Kathryn, please!
KATHRYN: (more agitated). How can Tom stand it? Don’t ya ever wonder, Grace? I don’t never hear him complain—
GRACE: Kathryn! As soon as the judge hears our testimony, he’s gonna rule for us. All they gotta do is take one look at us. It’ll be over in a day.”
KATHRYN: Think so?[41]
Soon thereafter, the Sob Sister joins them in the hospital room offering them a cash deal for exclusive rights to tell their story. Kathryn’s last words alive in the play are a concession to give up the lawsuit: “Grace, maybe we should do it.”[42] Everyone abandons Grace in her fight for justice and encourages her to give up and get on with what little she has left. The eugenicist notion that disability will inevitably lead to homelessness, poverty, and solitude is deeply entrenched, and, perhaps like an early disability rights activist, Grace seems to be the only one willing to fight, further developing her character as an image of trans-corporeality that has been enlivened in some way by her interactions with the deadly radium.
The historical importance of this case is also the heart of the Radium Girls’ story: industrial health reform. But the story goes much deeper. Not only did the Radium Girls fight for their own bodies and health, but their lives and their debility also interacted with others in a catalytic manner. Claudia Clark’s account of the Radium Girls describes how:
Industrial health bridges the history of labor and the social history of workers, the history of medicine and the social history of health and the environment, the traditional history of politics and the social history of politics. In the case of the dialpainters, we may also study the history of women.[43]
Even the radium poisoning itself was not so much a scientific discovery as it was “a social product born of political negotiation.”[44] The Radium Girls are more than just a case study; they were a catalyst for recognition and reform of the impact of industrialization and corporatism on individuals and society. Their very bodies were a source of trans-corporeal transformation in the social/industrial/political landscape. Industrialization had gripped much of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but the tangled relationship between factory, worker, science, business, and government was only beginning to be uncovered. The case of the Radium Girls was the first instance of industrial health reform to gain public recognition and to begin to turn the tide of reckless business practices.[45] For the Radium Girls, it was not just a fight for justice, but also for recognition and acceptance in the face of powerful men publicly denying their claims. Many lost heart. Many lost their lives. When D.W. Gregory portrays Grace’s solitary battle in Radium Girls, she emphasizes the poignant fragility of living in these crucial historical events, and how science and progress interact with bodies and lives, often exacting a steep and lonely price, and often at the expense of the disabled.
Though the battle for justice is lonely, the war is filled with onlookers and opportunists looking to make a buck. While Gregory represents Grace’s lonely challenge to the medical hegemony on the interpretation and ‘care’ of bodies, she visibly spotlights the speculators and Johnny-come-latelys that try to capitalize on the hype and sensation of the story. The newspapers are not the only ones trying to make a buck riding upon the girls’ crumbling backs; many people and institutions attempt to capitalize on what Jasbir K. Puar calls the “profitability of debility.”[46] During the frenetic opening of act two, with the public prattling on about the case and what they would do with the money, Grace Fryer makes her first public appearance, mediated by the news media, as a plaintiff in the case for the explicit purpose of stirring up public sympathy.
(Grace appears, walking with a cane.)
GRACE. I’d use it to pay my medical bills. (Reaction from CROWD.) And pay off the second mortgage on our house. The one my father took out to pay for my last operation. (Reactions of sympathy.)
SOB SISTER. Pretty Grace Fryer sits at home.
REPORTER. …suffering bravely through this entire ordeal.
SOB SISTER. …struggling valiantly to keep up her flagging spirits—
REPORTER. …for the sake of her family and her friends.
GRACE. It hurts to smile. But I try to smile. I know if I don’t smile—I’ll go crazy. (Approval from the CROWD.)[47]
This sequence appears at first glance to be a problematic appropriation of disability images to evoke public sympathy. What makes this exchange remarkable is that the theatrical audience gets to see the “behind the scenes” moments that take place before and after this public interchange, revealing that it is in fact a rehearsed and planned performance. At the very end of act one, Grace agrees to fight publicly to shame the company into giving in to the girls’ demands for compensation and justice. Ms. Wiley, one of the girls’ advocates, claims here and elsewhere in the play that “public sympathy” is both their strongest weapon for justice and the engine of social reform.[48] The moment after Grace’s first public appearance, Gregory utilizes a crucial stage direction signifying that “Wiley congratulates Grace” as the crowds disperse, giving approval for the stylized performance of being pitiful and marking it as a performance. Even Grace’s allies are now putting her and her disability on stylized display with a cane, enfreaking her even more, towards the goal of social justice. Alison Kafer, in her discussion of disability images on billboards, notes that “We need to recognize and challenge this strategic deployment of disability, acknowledging that rhetorics of disability acceptance and inclusion can be used to decidedly un-crip ends.”[49] Is Grace’s performance of tragic pathos an example of Wiley’s exploitation of disability for the benefit of social reform? Like the models for medical textbook photographs, Grace is not being paid for her performance. Is it a necessary ruse for the greater good? Who pays the price of progress? This Brechtian moment in the play brings the profitability issue to the surface, holding it up for scrutiny, throwing critical light on the role of exploitation in producing social reform. Though Ms. Wiley seems to genuinely want to help Grace and hold the U.S. Radium Corporation accountable for their negligence, her methods seem to implicitly condone the exploitation of disabled bodies. To think in contemporary terms, if Wiley had hired an actor to play the same part that Grace played in this public presentation, that actor would have been paid. When using actual people with actual disabilities for a media campaign on their behalf, the same performance is not compensated or seen as labor. The irony is profound: if one of the goals is to help you, then you do not get paid; if you have nothing to do with the campaign, you would get paid.[50]
Grace’s aloneness in her struggle is made all the more palpable in the final scene of the play during which Grace sits at Kathryn’s grave, spreading flowers and talking of watercolor paints. The scene at the grave recalls images from the previous scene with Kathryn in the hospital, with Grace sitting at her side and offering comfort. Grace is nearing the end of her own life and at this point is most likely unable to walk. She does not move from this position in the final scene. It is a scene that powerfully reveals how truly lonely the battle for justice is, with many casualties left along the way.
This final moment also raises an important question about how the play is staged and why Gregory chose not to highlight Grace’s physical condition in the script itself. In terms of theatrical spaces, Radium Girls in performance further illuminates the complex web of intra-activity between matter and biological bodies. Performers and audience share the same space, breathing the same air and feeling the same sound wave vibrations. Slight variations in these vibrations, neurologically interpreted as timbre and pitch modulations, contribute to an emotional performance and can combine with the photons reflected off an actor to generate emotional and intellectual changes in the audience, which can then set up a feedback loop with the performer, who then “feeds” off the live audience’s energy and attentive focus, all mediated by these material environmental agents. Temperature, which is just the average kinetic energy of environmental molecules, has a profound impact on audience reception, as anyone who has sat through a show where the heat was turned up a little too high can attest. And of course, the more bodies that are in a confined space like a theatre, the more body heat generated and the higher the ambient temperature. Environment and bodies, actors and audiences, are always already intra-acting in theatrical spaces, changing each other in palpable and interactive ways that are unique to live performance. Perhaps theatre itself (and especially Brechtian theatre) can be thought of as a kind of trans-corporeal, intra-active half-life that connects and impacts people in ways that could not have been otherwise conceived. By focusing on Radium Girls as a trans-corporeal space in performance, one could tease out the nuances of toxic, radioactive animacies while engaging with trans-corporeal spaces both within the world of the play and the world of the play’s performance.[51]
Unfortunately, such nuances rarely enter the sphere of production in regional and professional American theatre. Since Radium Girls is “one of the most performed plays in the 21st century,” an exhaustive list is probably impossible to gather, but I have found no evidence that a production has actually featured a disabled actress in the role of Grace.[52] This fact is perhaps unsurprising for many reasons, including the nature of the acting profession and the nature of actor training programs which tend to emphasize finding an idealized “normal” state of relaxation for an actor, what Carrie Sandahl has termed the “tyranny of the neutral” for its exclusion of non-normative bodies.[53]
But what might be the nuanced implications of using visible markers of disability when staging the play, particular the final scene, and how might notions of trans-corporeality affect those moments? The trans-corporeal space of Radium Girls in performance engages what Victoria Lewis calls the “reciprocal relationship between performance space and performer” which raises questions of access for audiences as well as artists.[54] The final moments of the play, where Grace sits at the grave of her friend Kathryn while US Radium President Arthur Roeder looks on from the distance, demonstrate the engaging potential of these embodied, reciprocal interactions of disability, performers, text, and audiences. In the original workshop production, prior to the script’s publication, the final scene was staged with “a doomed young girl in a wheelchair wearing high heels,” a moment the reviewer felt was a “jarring and distracting note in a drama that follows a passionate and intelligent course.”[55] Whether the wheelchair was a stage direction that was ultimately cut from the script or a choice by director Joseph Megel is unclear. Yet the question remains, how might the use of a wheelchair in this final scene operate within the kind of analysis here proposed? The cane that Grace used at the end of act one was a theatrical prop, a meta-performance of disability to arouse pity and sympathy in the crowd within the world of the play. At the grave side, however, Grace is unaware she has an audience and there are no publicity directors orchestrating her performance like Ms. Wiley did at the end of the first act. Indeed, she does not move in the final scene, so the presence of the wheelchair, or any physical marking of disability, is external to the dramatic action and thus operates in the world of the production, a prop to indicate the physical condition of the character and ostensibly to arouse pity and sympathy in the theatrical audience. This is why, I believe, using disabled markers like the wheelchair in the final scene does not work theatrically or dramatically. Audiences are now being overtly manipulated by the production to feel a certain way, and the result is “jarring and distracting” for the audience. Not to mention how problematic and ableist it is to assume that the sight of a wheel chair would or should elicit feelings of pity in an audience.
However, with an absence of physical markings of disability, it could be possible to read this final image of Grace as a problematic marginalization of disabled bodies being whitewashed and minimized. We know it is near the end of Grace’s life, and we know the physical toll that radium poisoning takes on bodies, so why leave Grace motionless on the ground without any other visible acknowledgement of her physical debilities? When staging this final scene, are you damned if you do and damned if you don’t, as it were? I believe this lack of “visible disability” marked on Grace’s body, in addition to being important for the dramatic action of the scene, is a manifestation of a cultural able-bodied gaze represented by Arthur Roeder. Roeder has returned to the grave site with his now-grown daughter, some fifteen years after the case was settled. He and Grace exist in the same space in different times when he finally has his moment of realization in the last line of the play. “Try as I might, Harriet, try as I might – I cannot remember their faces. (The irony strikes him.) I never saw their faces.”[56] He could not bring himself to look at the girls in the court room, when their marked bodies were placed on full display before him and the law, and now he cannot remember the faces that continue to haunt him. Here we see a palpable example of the complex interplay of the visible and the invisible as earlier described by Wolff. Roeder’s realization that persons with disabilities have their own lives and subjectivities comes too late for the girls in the play and is a potent reminder of the power of collective cultural denial that de-humanizes individuals with disabilities, rendering them invisible. Though the original workshop production with wheelchair and high heels may not have offered this possibility, understanding the play from this disability perspective holds the potential to shift the tragedy away from Grace and onto society in a Brechtian manner that implicates all of us, as we are all intra-acting in the material world.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson explains, “Disability studies reminds us that all bodies are shaped by their environments from the moment of conception. We transform constantly in response to our surroundings and register history on our bodies. The changes that occur when our body encounters the world are what we call disability.”[57] If disability is the change that occurs when bodies encounter the world, then scholars of theatre and performance have a particularly potent (if underutilized) critical ally in disability studies for examining performances and performance texts. In the case of this essay, treating radium itself as both actor and agent in the play Radium Girls engages with historical labor practices in what Stacy Alaimo might call a posthuman environmental ethics that is “not circumscribed by the human but is instead accountable to a material world that is never merely an external place but always the very substance of our selves and others.”[58] Contemporary critical thought is well aware of the power and agency ascribed to non-living or abstract entities such as class, gender, economics, and socio-politics. However, this exploration of Radium Girls demonstrates that accounting for the agency and animacy of material entities can transform the way we see our intra-acting bodies in the world, and the world in our bodies. A Disability perspective can transform how we think about and approach theatrical spaces as well, not just in terms of accessibility and access (for audiences and artists), but in terms of how bodies and spaces are always already intra-acting on each other. In this way, the personal responsibilities that are at stake in the play (to fight ignorance, exploitation, gender inequalities, etc.) are subsumed in the communal responsibility of that environmental ethic, a kind of universalizing aspect of debility that trans-acts within and among bodies, spaces, and even atoms. The in-between half-lives of disability always intra-act with environments, other bodies, and social forces in ways that can bring new insight to theatre and performance studies, disability studies, and other theories of scientific materiality.
Bradley Stephenson is an assistant professor of Theatre Arts at Catawba College in Salisbury, NC where he teaches theatre history, acting, improvisation, and playwriting. His scholarship has been published in Theatre Topics, Studies in Musical Theatre, Ecumenica, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and The Journal of American Drama and Theatre.
[1] Events similar to the New Jersey Radium Girls also happened in Ottawa, IL and are dramatized in the play These Shining Lives by Melanie Marnich (2010) which was adapted into a musical by Jessica Thebus, Andre Pluess, and Amanda Dehnert that premiered in 2015 at Chicago’s Northlight Theatre.
[2] Claudia Clark, Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
[3] D.W. Gregory, Radium Girls (Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2005), 8.
[4] Robert L. Daniels, “Review: ‘Radium Girls,’” Variety, 23 May 2000, accessed 7 March 2016, http://variety.com/2000/legit/reviews/radium-girls-1200462095/.
[5] Despite the play’s popularity and hundreds of productions since its 2000 premier, Radium Girls has yet to receive scholarly attention, a fact which I here hope to change.
[6] Though such an important debate about the nature and significance of disability and chronic illness is beyond the scope of this essay, many contemporary scholars such as Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Tobin Siebers, Robert McRuer, Anna Malloy, Lennard Davis, and others are thoughtfully engaging in how to adequately and appropriately theorize and understand disability and what it means in an evolving contemporary world.
[7] Jasbir K. Puar, “The Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18, no.1 (2011): 149.
[8] Ibid., 153.
[9] Ibid., 154.
[10] Gregory, Radium Girls, 54.
[11] For more about radium quack cures, consult the Oak Ridge Associated Universities’ Quack Cures Collection at http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/quackcures.htm and Radium Historical Items catalogue at http://pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML1008/ML100840118.pdf (accessed 4-30-2014). See also Paul Frame, “Radioactive Curative Devices and Spas,” The Oak Ridger, 5 November 1989.
[12] Gregory, Radium Girls, 37.
[13] Ibid., 78.
[14] Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 10.
[15] Mel Y. Chen, “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17, no. 2-3 (2011): 265.
[16] Gregory, Radium Girls, 13.
[17] Chen, “Toxic Animacies,” 266.
[18] Ibid., 279.
[19] Gregory, Radium Girls, 86.
[20] J. Rondo, “Long Term Retention of Radium in Man,” Nature 221, no. 5185 (15 March 1969): 1059.
[21] This newspaper article is in reference to the radium dial painters from Ottawa, Illinois, a few years after the New Jersey story, but the comparison is the same.
[22] Chen, “Toxic Animacies,” 279.
[23] Gregory, Radium Girls, 105.
[24] Ibid., 75-76.
[25] Alpha particles, which are ionized helium nuclei (two protons and two neutrons), have limited penetrative ability and do not pose a danger to humans unless the alpha-emitter is ingested. Gamma rays, however are profoundly energetic and can penetrate deep into the body, altering the very DNA of cells. For the Radium Girls, the bone-seeking qualities of the element probably caused illness, debility, and death much faster than the cancerous radiation effects they would have developed had they lived long enough. This bone-seeking quality is also why the Radium Girls’ symptoms started in the mouth and jaw, since they pointed their paint brushes on their lips.
[26] Gregory, Radium Girls, 82.
[27] Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 9, 2.
[28] Ibid., 7-8.
[29] Ibid., 115.
[30] Ibid., 4. Alaimo’s notion of trans-corporeality is based on Barad’s concept of “intra-active becoming” (i.e. things do not precede their relations but are always already relational).
[31] Tamsen Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 6.
[32] Gregory, Radium Girls, n.p.
[33] Deborah Stone, The Disabled State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 68.
[34] Ibid., 21.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Gregory, Radium Girls, 59.
[37] Stone, The Disabled State, 23.
[38] Ibid., 91.
[39] This medical understanding of disability is a uniquely modern phenomenon. Throughout most of history, disability was viewed from a moral or spiritual perspective, that disabilities were markings of sin or collusion with the devil, or some kind of punishment for moral turpitude. The different models of understanding disability is one of the many important contributions of disability scholars and theorists, too many to mention here.
[40] Gregory, Radium Girls, 24.
[41] Ibid., 65.
[42] Ibid., 68.
[43] Clark, Radium Girls, 5.
[44] Ibid., 3.
[45] Changes have been slow, particularly for women in the workforce, and industrial health is still a significant concern. Even today, approximately 100,000 Americans die each year from occupational diseases (Clark, Radium Girls, 11). The battle continues.
[46] Puar, “The Cost of Getting Better,” 153.
[47] Gregory, Radium Girls, 60.
[48] Ibid., 58, 63.
[49] Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 97.
[50] While beyond the scope of this project, exploring and exposing such ironies is a critical task in the larger worlds of disability employment, performance, and the media.
[51] At time of this writing, I am preparing to direct a production of Radium Girls that will attempt to capitalize on this trans-corporeal theory of half-life. Our production design will be minimalistic, and we will focus on the Brechtian elements that draw attention to the connections between performance and the world around the performance. I plan to work with my ensemble to explore the animacy of radium as an actor/character in a way that (I hope) will keep the pace and the tone both hopeful and thoughtful rather than grim and strident.
A common concept image used for the show is a glowing clock face, ever reminding the audience of the girl’s impending death as a result of their radium poisoning. Such an image of time and death seems to put ankle weights on the performance, slowing the pace with a constant, dread-inducing reminder of death. Instead, the concept image from which my production will spring to life is that of a spinthariscope, a small child’s toy from the time period that contains a small (harmless) amount of radioactive material encased in a tube or small canister lined with phosphorescent material. Some were as small as rings and could be found as prizes in cereal boxes. When taken into a dark room, letting your eyes adjust, if you looked into the spinthariscope you could see tiny flashes of light every time a radioactive emanation struck the phosphorescent lining. I find this image particularly hopeful and engaging to the imagination, as well as quite beautiful. The image amplifies the light and lightness of the radium’s animacy, developing the trans-corporeal space in an upward and outward trajectory, rather than the downward and dreary trajectory of the ticking clock of doom.
Dwelling on this story as merely or exclusively tragic misses the hope and benefits that arose from these events, the lives that were saved from the legislation that sparked public interest in industrial labor reform. An emphasis on the tragic is also problematic in the ways it can propagate the mindset that disability is the definition of personal tragedy and loss, rather than the trans-corporeal and generative sense that brings new perspectives and experiences to life that could not have otherwise occurred. The very first line of the show, spoken by Grace, is “So much light” (11). I see this line as the inflection point of the play: it will turn either downward and dark or upward and light, depending upon the nuances of one’s interpretation of the nature and significance of these toxic, radioactive animacies.
[52] Mark Bretz, “The Sad, Tragic Tale of the ‘Radium Girls’: Theatre Review,” Ladue News, 1 April 2015, accessed 7 March 2016, http://www.laduenews.com/diversions/arts-entertainment/the-sad-tragic-tale-of-the-radium-girls-theater-review/article_ca20d23e-d8b8-11e4-86cc-7799675ff9c6.html.
[53] Carrie Sandahl, “The Tyranny of Neutral: Disabililty and Actor Training,” in Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, ed. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). While an exploration of disability and acting in the professional world is beyond the scope of this essay, such questions of access are among the most pressing on the contemporary theatrical world.
[54] Victoria Lewis, “The Theatrical Landscape of Disability,” Disability Studies Quarterly 24, no. 3 (summer 2004): n.p.
[55] Daniels, “Review: ‘Radium Girls,’” n.p.
[56] Gregory, Radium Girls, 110.
[57] Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Disability and Representation,” PMLA 120, no. 2 (March 2005), 524.
[58] Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 158.
“This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D. W. Gregory’s Radium Girls” by Bradley Stephenson
ISNN 2376-4236
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre
Volume 28, Number 2 (Spring 2016)
©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
Editorial Board:
Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson
Advisory Editor: David Savran
Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve
Editorial Staff:
Managing Editor: James Armstrong
Editorial Assistant: Kyueun Kim
Advisory Board:
Michael Y. Bennett
Kevin Byrne
Bill Demastes
Jorge Huerta
Amy E. Hughes
Esther Kim Lee
Kim Marra
Beth Osborne
Jordan Schildcrout
Robert Vorlicky
Maurya Wickstrom
Stacy Wolf
Table of Contents:
- “This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D. W. Gregory’s Radium Girls” by Bradley Stephenson
- “Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of The End of the Moon” by Vivian Appler
- “iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change” by Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd and Suzanne Trauth
- “Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum” by Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio
- “Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters” by George Pate and Libby Ricardo
www.jadtjournal.org
jadt@gc.cuny.edu
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:
Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director
©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
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