Melanie Marnich’s play These Shining Lives depicts the true story of the battle fought by four female factory workers against an employer whose work is making them sick.
In the 1920s, the Radium Dial Company hired thousands of female workers at three plants around the country. Their job was to paint a radium-laced, glow-in-the-dark substance onto the dials of clocks and watches. The women were never warned about the harmful effects of the radioactive element, and many later died from radium poisoning.