Out of the Shadows, a 'Shining' Moment
Melanie Marnich Sheds New Light On Most Dangerous Women's Work

By Celia Wren
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, April 20, 2008; M04

BALTIMORE -- We live in a safety-conscious age, an era of childproof caps and seat-belt-sensor cars and drug advertisements that have page-long disclaimers. So it's all the more shocking to learn the history behind "These Shining Lives," the latest concoction from the rising playwright Melanie Marnich.

The drama, receiving its world premiere at Baltimore's Center Stage starting April 24, revisits a scandal involving radium poisoning and corporate malfeasance in the 1920s and '30s.

During and after World War I, many American women landed jobs as dial painters in factories churning out luminous watches (accessories that became trendy after catching on with soldiers in the trenches). At the time, radium was thought a harmless and even salutary substance, and the dial painters -- who often angled their paintbrush bristles with their lips -- would sometimes slick their nails or eyelids with the stuff, for glow-in-the-dark laughs.

When the workers began to develop gruesome medical conditions, however, including necrosis of the jaw, company bigwigs denied and hushed up evidence pointing to radium as the culprit. Braving significant social pressure, dial painters in various parts of the country sued, sparking a media frenzy and leading to groundbreaking occupational-safety reforms.

For those already poisoned, dollars and legal rulings were too little, too late -- but later generations have benefited. "These women in their tragedy reached their potential and power as human beings, because they stood up and did something," Marnich observed in an interview at Center Stage, during a weekend respite from her job writing for the HBO show "Big Love."

The jeans-clad, backpack-toting playwright claimed fatigue, having just jetted in from Ohio, where she visited her newly minted comedy "A Sleeping Country" at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. (Round House Theatre will mount the Washington area premiere in 2009.) But she had no trouble discussing the political, feminist and economic overtones of "These Shining Lives," based on the stories of Illinois dial painters -- as Marnich depicts them, gutsy, fun-loving gals who could crack a joke even while dying.

"It's easy to look in the past -- at the 1910s, '20s, '30s, the Depression era -- and say, 'Oh my gosh, this is when big business did the little person wrong,' " Marnich says. But "we're still facing these same issues over and over: David versus Goliath."

For Marnich, who grew up in the 1960s in Duluth, Minn., in what she describes as a blue-collar household (her father worked in a cement plant), the dial painters' story speaks broadly of "how difficult it is for people of a certain class to really stand up and say, 'No, I am entitled to justice.' "

That socially conscious subtext was what attracted Center Stage Artistic Director Irene Lewis to "These Shining Lives." "I started in political theater myself, many, many moons ago," says Lewis, who sees the piece as a musing on "individual versus corporate responsibility."

(Marnich's work is not the only drama about the dial painters controversy. "Radium Girls," by D.W. Gregory, a former Washington Post theater critic, related the plight of New Jersey workers. The play debuted at the Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey in 2000.)

With its political awareness and solid grounding in time and place, "These Shining Lives" is a departure for Marnich. She chose more ambiguous or fluid settings for her best-known plays, which include the poignant "Blur," about an optically impaired girl with wacky friends; "Quake," a zany picaresque about a woman who idolizes a serial killer; and "Tallgrass Gothic," an adaptation of the Jacobean tragedy "The Changeling," set somewhere in the Great Plains. Her other works include the book for the musical "The Brand New Kid," seen at the Kennedy Center in 2006, and "Calling All," a comedy based on her stint in telephone fundraising, back when she was trying to segue from a post-college advertising job to playwriting.

Many of Marnich's works display subtly stylized language and a sensibility that's delicately oddball, even when probing troubling topics. "Melanie has a lightness -- a very powerful lightness," says David Schweizer, director of "These Shining Lives." "She tackles very interesting subjects -- often social problems or portraits of very intense human pain or dysfunction, and does so in a way that's eerily palpable. There's an acceptance that there's pain, there's joy, that life is very unpredictable."

Richard Hamburger, former artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center -- which has presented three Marnich plays -- says her writing's eccentricity illuminates the nation's character. "She has a great knack for quirky lines that in their totality reveal the pathos of idiosyncratic people," he says. "You don't immediately see it, so there's a subtlety to it. It's a vision of America. She puts an odd assortment of people together to see how they combust."

The combustible folks in Marnich's plays include many strong, willful female characters, who often forge intense bonds with other women. "I like writing about characters with emotional and psychological muscle, who take action, and who are allowed to make huge mistakes in pursuit of a goal," the playwright says, adding that for cultural reasons such traits sometimes "wind up more interesting in a female body."

This writerly inclination made her susceptible when, some years ago, she stumbled across a newspaper article that mentioned the radium case. Around the same time, Northlight Theatre in Skokie, Ill., approached her about a commission, and the Illinois side of the dial painters' tragedy seemed prime material. (Northlight ultimately opted not to produce the script. The Northlight dramaturg who spearheaded the commission, Gavin Witt, now works at Center Stage.)

Choosing a historical subject was one thing; fleshing out the idea into a play -- while staying true to the ordeal of the poisoned workers -- was another. "I struggled with giving myself the artistic license to make it theatrical," Marnich says.

The artistic conflict is now behind her, and with the end to the Writers Guild of America strike, she's acclimating to her bicoastal life. (She splits her time between California and Brooklyn, where she shares a home with her husband, playwright Lee Blessing.)

Still, Marnich obviously hasn't wholly shaken the burden of chronicling the radium tragedy. "I didn't want to screw up," she says emphatically as she sits in a quiet Center Stage hallway. "I really wanted to do justice to these people."