By Madison Rohn, Lead Editor
Photography by Michelle Magnussen
“This isn’t a fairy tale, though it starts like one. It’s not a tragedy, though it ends like one.” This line begins the play These Shining Lives, which McKendree Theatre will perform from February 29th to March 3rd.
The play, written by Melanie Marnich, tells the compelling true story of Catherine Wolfe Donohue, one of the thousands of women hired by the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois, during the 1920s to paint watch faces with radium. As told in the play, Radium Dial ensured their watch painters that radium was safe, even though the company knew otherwise. After Catherine and her co-workers contracted radium poisoning, they sued the company. Catherine’s eventual legal victory changed worker safety laws in America forever.
These Shining Lives focuses on Catherine as she starts working at Radium Dial, forms life-changing friendships with her co-workers, and fights for justice. She faces opposition from the company, the press, and even from her own body as her health quickly deteriorates.
The students who make up the cast and crew have spent the last seven weeks hard at work rehearsing, getting into character, and preparing the set and technical elements. Under the guidance of director Michelle Magnussen and technical director Doug Magnussen, the cast and crew lifted the story of Catherine Donohue off the pages and brought it to the stage of the Hettenhausen Center for the Arts in a show that is bold, beautiful, and heart-wrenching at the same time.
Marin Jalinsky, a freshman music education major, plays Charlotte Purcell, one of Catherine’s close friends and co-workers at Radium Dial. To Marin, the Charlotte she is portraying is more than just a character. She said, “It’s kind of mind-boggling to think I’m playing somebody’s actual life, and it’s kind of nice just giving her justice.”
Although Charlotte is fiery and guarded, there are a few moments when her emotional walls come down. Marin explained her method for portraying Charlotte’s complex emotions: “I definitely get in the car and say the lines to myself and think to myself how she would feel and kind of like muster up the emotions so that when I get backstage, I can go back in my mind and [think] like, okay this is the way I want to act when I’m out there.”
Even though the play is full of emotions, Marin said it’s an experience the audience will enjoy. “It’s a really emotional show, but there’s stuff in there that’ll make people laugh. And I’m really hoping that this show will give justice to the girls that fought in the past and that they enjoy the show.”
Brenden Meyer plays Catherine’s husband Tom, who is also based on a real person. Portraying a real person can come with some pressure, as Brenden explained: “It’s honestly kind of surreal, and I think about this a lot. This is a dude. This is a real dude, and it kind of freaks me out ‘cause … what if they’re looking down on me, you know what I mean? It’s also like, I don’t want to accidentally disrespect Tom ‘cause if he’s a real person, it’s not as much a character as a lot of other characters in shows because if he existed, he was his own person.”
Throughout the play, Tom struggles with adjusting to many drastic changes: his wife working full time, receiving backlash from his coworkers over the lawsuit, and grappling with the difficult truth that his wife is dying. Brenden said he prepares for these heavy scenes by using his personal experiences: “I’m already exhausted 24/7, so I just kind of dip into that a bit, and I just kind of try to get more somber. And I get into the headspace of like this: you’re already tired, Tom’s exhausted here because he’s been working day-in day-out for his wife. And just feeling that with him makes me feel strongly connected with him.”
But out of all these scenes, Brenden said he’s most excited for the audience to see one of the lighthearted scenes when Tom and Catherine tell the story of how they met. “It’s so cute. It’s adorable. I am excited for my monologue at the end, but at the same time, it’s not that special compared to sharing a scene with somebody … ‘cause I feel like I have a good chemistry with the majority of the cast. But like, the scenes I have with Catherine are very, like, they’re fun, and you can tell we’re kind of like work friends but also just friends. It’s just fun. It’s really fun to do.”
Senior Alex Brandenburger designed the lighting for the show, which will be his last theatre performance at McKendree before he graduates. He explained that he originally started doing technical elements for theatre in high school and coming to McKendree has only enhanced his knowledge: “In high school, my friend did theatre tech stuff, and so whenever I got to high school I was like, oh cool I’ll try this. This looks like fun. And I ended up enjoying it. And it’s just something I really enjoyed doing over the years and getting to McKendree and the Hett, just the amount of new stuff I was able to use for lighting was incredible, and it’s just been an absolute blast.”
Even though his lighting experience does not directly relate to his cybersecurity major, Alex still wants to use his lighting skills in the future. “For my major, it’s not really the best experience to have, but I am looking at potentially doing lighting stuff as side work because it’s something I feel like I have deep passion for, and I don’t want to stop after college. It’s kind of like a ‘not now, but not never.’”
These Shining Lives will be Alex’s sixth show at McKendree. When asked what his favorite shows so far have been, he said, “Design-wise, I absolutely loved designing the lights for Silent Sky. I think that has been my best work here. For the material itself, The Play That Goes Wrong. It was an absolutely hilarious play, and it was a blast every night.”
With These Shining Lives, Alex said the lighting and other technical components of the show may not be the first things the audience notices, but they play an important role by adding to the emotion of the show. In his own words, he said, “The tech stuff for this show specifically is not as compelling as the acting and the material because the actors have been absolutely phenomenal and they’re really, they’re giving enough weight to the material to do it justice … I feel like the lighting helps enhance a lot of the scenes to help give it the emotion that the material’s trying to provoke.”
These Shining Lives will be at the Hettenhausen Center for the Arts on February 29th at 10:00 A.M., March 1st and 2nd at 7:30 P.M., and March 3rd at 2:30 P.M. Tickets are $5 but are free for McKendree students, faculty, and staff. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit https://www.mckendree.edu/the_hett/.
For more information about Catherine Donohue and the women who worked at and sued Radium Dial, check out this article by NPR: The Radium Girls: An Illinois Tragedy | NPR Illinois
Reference
Wilcoxson, S. (2021, December 29). Catherine Donohue. Sagas of She. https://sagasofshe.wordpress.com/2021/12/29/catherine-donohue-by-samantha-wilcoxson/
