All that glitters is not gold. Sometimes it’s the sparkle in a man’s eyes that makes a woman fall in love … or the prospect of a new job and the freedoms that come with it. Catherine Donohue, the real-life protagonist of Melanie Marnich’s play, “These Shining Lives,” experiences both, finding love in the gaze of a construction worker and employment at Chicago’s Radium Dial Company in the Roaring Twenties.

Catherine (Emma Joan Roberts), in her electric-blonde bob cut, has a bounce in her step as she takes the stage, the personification of feminine youth, playing a kissing game with her husband, Tom (Jonathan C. Kaplan). Tom is befuddled by his wife’s interest in working full-time, but at 8 cents for every watch dial Catherine will paint with iridescent radium, who can complain?