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Logan Daily
Theater 151
September 25, 2017

These Shining Lives

The play These Shining Lives is about four young women who work for a radium watch

dial factory, Radium Dial. In These Shining Lives, Catherine Donahue is portrayed as the

protagonist. By the end of the play, Catherine is the true hero; Moreover, everyone looks up to

her because of how she fought the company, Radium Dial, for encouraging the ingestion of

radium. This ingestion of radium, a radioactive element thought to be safe, caused radium

poisoning and ultimately led to the death of Catherine Donahue and many other women in the

1920’s and 1930’s. The actor expressed her emotions very upbeat and vibrant, which showed

that she was the leader because these actions eventually led to her coworkers looking up to her.

Ultimately, the set of the play has seven different locations. The factory, Catherine’s

house, the beach, the doctor’s office, the courthouse, Mr. Reed’s office, and the attorney’s office.

One will notice that the set locations will change based on where the actors are placed on stage.

To be precise, upstage center was the radium factory, center stage left was Catherine’s house,

downstage center was the beach, and center stage right was where the courthouse and all the

offices were. Some other key factors of knowing what location we are at in the play are lights

and sound. For example, in the scene where the ladies were on the beach at Lake Michigan,

everyone knew exactly where the characters were just from the sound of waves crashing onto the

sand. The lights play a huge role in showing the audience what time of day it is, who is talking,

or something of value that needs emphasis put on it. In the night time scene at Catherine’s house,

the lights help show the audience what time it is by dimming the lights down low, but still on
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enough to where you can tell they are in a house. The set really helped reveal the trueness of

each character by putting the audience in an environment that really looked and felt like the 20’s

and 30’s time period. The design of clothing, Catherine’s house, and the way women are

portrayed really sets the tone for this time period.

The dress Catherine wears during the play is a long, light blue dress with white heels, and

occasionally a hat. The bright red lipstick, rosy cheeks, bobbed curly hair, and clothing really

conveys her given circumstances because she looks exactly like one would imagine a woman in

the 1920’s or 1930’s would look. From beginning to end, we see a major change in Catherine’s

physical appearance. In the beginning, Catherine’s dress has a snug fit on her, giving her a

healthy and joyful presence. As she begins to work at Radium Dial, the audience will start to

notice that Catherine is shining. In the play, Catherine’s glow is shown by glitter that was put in

her hair and on her outfit. More toward the ending of the play, Catherine’s weight loss is

depicted by making her dress look bigger, or looser, by unzipping the back of her dress. Her

dreadful pain caused by radium poisoning was shown from bending her back and walking very

slow. Also, the audience can see that the radium has permanently sunken into her skin by a sort

of bright green luminescent paint that is on her hands.

During the play, some actors play a number of different characters. The audience knows

that a character change has taken place by not only the way their costume has changed, but also

the way the actor’s personality has changed. For example, the actor Sean Diaz was Tom

Donahue and the only doctor that would tell the truth to the four women. When he was acting as

Tom, he wore a green striped shirt with khakis and suspenders. On the other hand, as the doctor,

he wore a white lab coat over his initial outfit. The character changes were very effective

because not only did the actor look like a whole different person, but his personality took a
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complete 180-degree turn. Being in the audience myself, I feel like the actors as a whole fully

justified their multiple characters by really selling the two, or three, different personalities.

Direction ultimately created focus by where to lights were. As a part of the audience, my

focus was always where the lights were pointing. By concluding this, we can see that goal of

light focus worked because the audience knows all important things will be where the lights are

directed at. Two scenes that I personally thought had perfect focus were in Catherine’s house and

when the women were at the factory. In these two particular scenes, the light focus was so

perfect that it felt like you could only see that part of the stage, or almost like you were zoned in

to that one specific area. The director’s vision was to shed light on the importance of how the

women took a stand against the company and fought, instead of sitting back and dealing with it

like women were “supposed” to do in that time period. The one word I felt like was most present

in the play was time. As an audience, you could see time passing and even hear the actors

mention time, a lot. At the end of the play, time was symbolized by the clocks, with no hands, on

the wall ticking away. This showed that Catherine’s final wish had happened: for time to stop

and not be able to negatively affect her life anymore.