Theatre 98 Stages ‘Radium Girls,’ the True Story of the Women Who Were Told to Point the Brush With Their Lips

Theatre 98 in Fairhope opens its production of “Radium Girls” on July 17, bringing to the Eastern Shore one of the most quietly devastating true stories in American industrial history.

The Play

“Radium Girls” is based on the young women who painted luminous watch dials for the U.S. Radium Corporation in the 1920s. The work paid well. It was considered desirable. And the women were instructed to shape the tips of their brushes with their lips — a technique called “lip-pointing” — ingesting radium with every dial they painted. Company executives, who handled the same material behind lead shields and with tongs, told them it was harmless.

The play examines what happens when profits are prioritized over people, and it asks a question that has not aged a day: who should society hold responsible for unintended consequences? Described as at times both heartbreaking and uplifting, it is a work of theatre that trusts its audience to sit with a hard story.

Written by playwright D.W. Gregory, the script centers on Grace Fryer, one of the dial painters at U.S. Radium's plant in Orange, New Jersey, and Arthur Roeder, the company's president. Fryer and four co-workers sued the company in 1927, and the closely watched case was settled out of court in 1928.

Why the Story Still Matters

The women who sued U.S. Radium — sick, dying, and in several cases too weak to raise their arms to take an oath in court — helped establish something that outlived every one of them: the legal principle that a worker has the right to sue an employer for occupational disease.

Their case reshaped American labor law and contributed directly to the development of workplace safety standards and, eventually, the regulatory architecture that became OSHA. It is not an exaggeration to say that protections most American workers now take for granted were purchased by a small group of young women whose bones were literally disintegrating.

That is the weight a community theatre takes on when it puts this play on its season. It is a considerable one, and it is a credit to Theatre 98 for doing it.

Performance Schedule

The production runs across three weekends:

• July 17–19
• July 23–26
• July 30–August 2

Show times: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday; 2:30 p.m. Sunday. Tickets: $25 for adults, $20 for students. More details are available at theatre98.org.

About Theatre 98

Theatre 98 is Fairhope’s long-running community theatre, and it has been a fixture of the Eastern Shore’s arts scene for decades. Community theatre at this level is one of the more underrated assets a small city can have — it puts serious work in front of local audiences at a price a family can actually pay, and it does it with neighbors on the stage.