These Shining Lives highlights the strength of women considered expendable in their day, exploring their true story and its continued resonance. Catherine Donohue and her friends have loving families and good jobs painting glow-in-the-dark watch faces at Chicago’s Radium Dial Company, and the 1920s seem full of promise. Tragedy comes when Catherine and her colleagues begin falling ill, one by one, with mystifying ailments. When the cause of their symptoms finally becomes clear, Catherine and her friends find a way to deal with their own truth: that the job they love, that has gifted them with independence, has betrayed them and will slowly kill them. This is a story of survival in its most transcendent sense, as these women refuse to allow the company that stole their health to kill their spirits or endanger the lives of those who come after them.

The play is poetic, theatrical, and, like a memory, ephemeral.  In other moments, it is factual, hard hitting, and tragic.  The women are not victims, they are stronger than that.  The music follows Catherine's journey -- her life made of time, and the release she can finally experience at the end.

Period music was sourced to the radio, and the motif of time associated with the clock on the header on stage.

To more closely align the melodic part of the music with Catherine's journey, a wireless microphone allowed the actor to interact with the music.  Tempo, pitch, and harmonies change based on her delivery of the text.  Max/MSP triggered samples in QLab based on audio input from the microphone. In the final moments of the play, Catherine transcends and the denoument of her story allows her soul to rest. Her world made of time (represented by the clock) transcends and becomes the beating heart of the women to whom her story gives agency. The windchimes at the end were symbolic of the stars.

Claire Trevor School of the Arts
University of California - Irvine

Director:
Sarah Butts

Scenic Design:
Leah Ramillano

Costume Design:
Josephine Siu

Lighting Design:
Wes Chew

Photo Credit:
Paul Kennedy