This isn’t a fairy tale, though it starts like one. It’s not a tragedy, though it ends like one.
Catherine Donohue’s opening line to the audience in These Shining Lives sets the tone for a play that is hard to categorize.
Based on the true story, it shows us the lives of the “radium girls” who painted dials with glowing radium-infused paint to create watches that could be read in the dark.
Catherine Donohue and her coworkers at Radium Dial in Ottawa, Illinois, were among the many women who worked in conditions that exposed them to a radioactive chemical that …
