Radium Girls is a play about Grace Fryer and her coworkers who fought for justice due to illnesses incurred from painting luminous dials on watches in the 1920s. A true story, U.S.Radium Corporation hired hundreds of girls to hand draw dials on watches using radium, recently discovered by Madame Curie and considered to be a medical miracle cure. The girls were told to lick the brushes in order to get a fine brush point, thus ingesting what turned out to be a very toxic element. Sadly, most of the girls died within a few years.

One of the watch factories was located just miles from GRHS and a few blocks from Star Tavern in Orange, NJ. Rehearsals for the fast paced play began immediately following auditions in September. Julia Kolinksi,
who plays Grace, remarks, “rehearsals are just a very open and creative environment. Rehearsals for me have become a space that allows me to bond with so many new people”. The three months of play practices and run-throughs were hard work, but the pay-off is evident. Julia explains, “we do a lot of work, and perfecting a scene and a show is time consuming but the final product is always worth it”.