Write a commentCNY Arts Center announces the next play in their 2022 season, Radium Girls by D. W. Gregory, to run weekends October 7-16.
Director William E. White has begun production design meetings and rehearsals with a cast of nearly 20 actors playing more than 30 characters. The drama is inspired by a true story as recounted in the Play Synopsis from Dramatic Publishing.
“In 1926, radium was a miracle cure, Madame Curie an international celebrity, and luminous watches the latest rage – until the girls who painted them began to fall ill with a mysterious disease. Radium Girls traces the efforts of Grace Fryer, a dial painter, as she fights for her day in court. Her chief adversary is her former employer, Arthur Roeder, an idealistic man who cannot bring himself to believe that the same element that shrinks tumors could have anything to do with the terrifying rash of illnesses among his employees.
Grace wasn’t the first to bring litigation, but she was certainly the most resolute. It took two years to find a lawyer willing to take her case. With the statute of limitations for industrial injury being only five months in New Jersey, and radium poisoning not even covered in existing occupational injury laws, and with radium eating away at her own jaw and back, nevertheless, Grace Fryer persisted.
As the case goes on, however, Grace finds herself battling not just with the U.S. Radium Corporation, but with her own family and friends, who fear that her campaign for justice will backfire. “
The production will be presented at CNY Arts Center, located at 121 Cayuga St. in downtown Fulton. Tickets are available online at CNYArtsCenter.com/tickets. For more information, call 315-598-ARTS (2787).
