Radium Girls

Picture 28 teenage actors swarming a rehearsal hall – and that doesn’t even count the crew.

The mere thought might bring shivers of chaos, but the reality doesn’t faze teacher and director Joey Chavez. He’s done it before.

“You develop a sense of organized chaos,” he said, explaining that you learn how to filter out distractions. “I’ve had casts of actually more than 50 before.”

Chavez, who taught theater for 15 years at Santa Fe High School before moving to the New Mexico School for the Arts when it opened five years ago, is bringing “Radium Girls” to the stage at the James A. Little Theater this weekend. He is sharing directing duties with Deborah Potter.

The play by D.W. Gregory is based on actual events, when women working in dial factories used their lips and tongues to create a fine point on their brushes. Unfortunately, those brushes held paint containing radium, which was used to make the numbers glow in the dark on dials of watches and clocks, as well as on the instrument panels of U.S. Air Force planes.

Women working in those jobs began developing effects from that radium exposure, such as bone loss or tumors in the jaw and bleeding from the gums. “Radium Girls” traces the efforts by dial painter Grace Fryer in the 1920s to get judicial recognition of the harm caused by her and her colleagues’ jobs.

Chavez said a few of the older students had heard about this piece of history, but many others in the cast and crew were learning about it for the first time. Their reaction?

“They were appalled that the corporation was making them do that,” he said. While many factories at the time kept workers in deplorable conditions, with resulting deaths in fires and other tragedies, the students were “thinking of it from today’s perspective,” Chavez noted.

Students portraying corporate officials in the play were warned, though, not to present them as evil characters. “The president of U.S. Radium Corporation doesn’t think he’s a bad guy,” Chavez said. “They didn’t believe they were hurting the girls.”

The play offered a teaching opportunity in both history and science. Two teachers from the science department gave a lecture to cast and crew about radium, Chavez said, and subsequent articles about the topic have been disseminated.

Parallels to tobacco are apparent. As a matter of fact, at the end of the play, the main character is smoking a cigarette as she talks about how science didn’t initially know the substances they were exposed to would harm them, Chavez said.

He said he read the script for “Radium Girls” when it first came out about 10 years ago. “I really liked it,” he said, noting that it offered roles that were significant in the quality of the character and arc of the story, especially for girls. That matters when females tend to outnumber males about 3-to-1 in the theater, at least in the teen years, he noted.

Chavez said he also liked that the script was based on actual events that led to improvements in workplace regulations.

As for the 28 cast members, recommendations for the play are to double- or even triple-cast some roles, making it possible to get by with a cast of 10. But, Chavez said, he chose to use 28 actors in order to give more students a chance to appear onstage.

They started work on the play back in November and spent 1½ hours per day on rehearsal, expanding to 2½ hours a week or two before performances were slated to start.

The New Mexico School for the Arts attracts students from around the state and even around the country. Those in the theater department present five to six productions a year, he said, including some one-act plays written and produced by the students themselves.

Ten students also have internships at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, he said, where they learn technical aspects of theater, such as lights, sound and riggings.

During the course of an academic year, the school stages about 35 public performances and exhibitions, with most of the recent additions coming from the Music Department, according to Julie Gomez, director of development. Many shows generate a full house, she added.

“We believe it is important for our students to gain exposure and practice their work outside the safety of the classroom,” she wrote in an email. “Not to mention, NMSA students love to perform – they are hungry for every opportunity they have to perform or exhibit their work!”