‘These Shining Lives’ fails to illuminate

by Jacqueline Watts
editor@baltimoreguide.com
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“These Shining Lives” really wants to be a documentary play, or maybe not. It’s part Roaring Twenties newsreel, part melodrama, part polemic and part soap opera, and it never does manage to settle down comfortably somewhere.

Kate Gleason and Cheryl Lynn Bowers play factory girls in “These Shining Lives” at Centerstage.

Photo by Richard Anderson; courtesy Centerstage

Melanie Marnich’s attempt to dramatize the sorry story of women who took factory jobs during the 1920s painting radium dials on watches is short and to the point, but never manages to stir the audience to much other than a shrug. It’s as if Marnich aimed at simplicity, missed and hit “simplistic” instead.
Director David Schweizer does what he can, moving things along efficiently like a factory line, stopping the line ever so briefly for the Important Moments.
Four actresses—Cheryl Lynn Bowers, Kate Gleason, Kelly McAndrew and Emma Joan Roberts—carry the production and wring what they can from thin material.
“These Shining Lives” is the story of Catherine Donohue (Roberts), a woman with a perfect husband who has roving hands and enlightened views about women’s work, two perfect and supportive children, and a yen to make a little extra money. She goes to work for the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois, painting clock and watch faces for eight cents apiece. She turns out to be very good at it and for a while at least, the job returns the favor, lifting the Donohues into the bleacher seats of the middle class.
Catherine has three coworkers—the Perky One, the Preachy One, and the One with the Snappy Comebacks. There is the Boss, Mr. Reed, and Tom, the aforementioned Perfect Husband, who spends his workday building newfangled skyscrapers in Chicago.
Unfortunately this is about as far as the characterizations go, a situation that is abetted by the costume designer, who dresses the women in flat monochromatic pastels—Charlotte is green and Catherine peach, and Mr. Reed always wears a blue suit; Tom, the Noble Worker, wears brown.
The four women get sick. They find out that Radium Dial Co. knew that radium is poisonous, and behaved as corporations do when they discover a problem—they covered it up.
Catherine becomes the subject of one of the first workers’ compensation class action suits. It turns out that Radium Dial Co. appeals and appeals and appeals all the way to the Supreme Court. Not nice, and radium poisoning is not a good way to go at all.
It is a shameful story that deserves telling, but it has been done better elsewhere than “These Shining Lives.”