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Shining a Light: Drama Club Brings Radium Girls to Life on Stage
BY MADDIE BISHOP & AARON HILL
NOVEMBER 30, 2025, 12:28 P.M.
Coming off the high of the wildly successful spring musical, Mamma Mia, the EBHS Drama Club is back with another powerful story. Radium Girls by D.W. Gregory tells tragic tales of the dying dial painters of the 1920s, otherwise known as the Radium Girls.
The play details the destructive effects of radium, a toxic luminescent substance used during World War I to allow soldiers and pilots to see their watch dials in the dark. Young girls worked in factories owned by the U.S. Radium Corperation, painting luminescent ticks onto watch dials every day. To keep a fine point on their brushes, they twirled the bristles between their lips, unknowingly ingesting the lethal element.
The dangers of radium were not well known then, so when many girls began mysteriously dying, a lengthy legal battle ensued about whether the US Radium Corporation was legally responsible for the deaths of the girls. Radium Girls specifically follows Grace Fryer, a former dial painter who sues her employer, Arthur Roeder, while watching her friends slowly die and facing her own imminent death.
The show is especially meaningful as a high school production because many of the dial painters were teenagers who dropped out of school to work in the factories.
Senior Norah Heilbronn, who plays one of Grace’s dial painter friends, said, “I’m glad I’m in Radium Girls because it’s an important story to tell and we don’t want history to repeat itself.” Her character, Kathryn, was just 14 when she started working in the factory, younger than Heilbronn is now. She “still feels so young,” but “100 years ago, a girl [her] age was subject to such immense pain and suffering.” Heilbronn reminds audiences that although it’s easy to feel disconnected with history, shows like these are important in bringing history back to the present.
The drama club also welcomed a new co-director, Counselor Mrs. Cracolici, this show. Mrs. Cracolici stated she was initially “a little nervous going into it because [she has] no theatre experience,” but the experience “has been very rewarding and such a breath of fresh air.”
Club members appreciated her addition to the club; Junior Bella Petrocelli said, “It’s nice to have a fresh face and fresh viewpoint on the shows we do here.”
Throughout the last three months, the cast worked closely with one another to bring the play to life, creating deep, meaningful connections along the way.
“It's inspiring to see the teamwork this cast brings and to see these beautiful women with so much strength portrayed on stage,” said sophomore Zori Sher.
The two-act show had a successful run, closing out the fall season on November 23rd. The cast and crew of EBHS Drama Club are excited to now enter into their spring musical, SpongeBob SquarePants: The SpongeBob Musical.
