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?
Of course, the audience is aware that this fairy tale will end in tragedy, not just because Catherine tells us so in her opening monologue. Radium, once believed to be the modern “cure for what ails you,” is a toxic, radioactive substance, and Catherine and her coworkers are exposed to it daily.
The play has its comic moments, including the interplay between “the girls” — Pearl (Cheryl Lynn Bowers) with her bad jokes, the Mae-West-meets-Unsinkable-Molly-Brown Charlotte (Kelly McAndrew) and the group’s “moral backbone,” Frances (Kate Gleason), though these characters are given little chance to evolve beyond the level of plucky girlfriends done wrong.
“The Man” who done them wrong, Radium Dial, is personified by the manager, Mr. Reed (Erik Lochtefeld). Lochtefeld also plays the Company Doctor, and both are expert at handing out lies as the girls wonder about their strange aches and glowing bones.
In between, Marnich explores the changes in gender roles that began to emerge in the early 20th century. Tom finds the tables turned when it is he who must make dinner and tend to the kids. When Catherine tries to make amends with a gift, he quips, “I’m not that kind of girl.”
Tom is also prophetic, saying “Work always costs you something.” For the girls, they pay the ultimate price, but Catherine refuses to go down without a fight. Like the real-life Mrs. Donohue, she takes her case to the Supreme Court, setting precedent to make employers “act in the best interest of employees’ safety,” a promise Radium Dial made but never delivered.
