Radium Girls: Kanata Theatre Can’t Rescue A Bad Play
There’s the potential for an absorbing theatre piece in the story that Radium Girls has to tell. But that potential is squandered, first by deficiencies in D.W. Gregory’s script, and secondly by Kanata Theatre’s failure to surmount the challenges it poses.
The play deals with the real-life tragedy of the young women who had the misfortune of working for the U.S. Radium Corporation a century ago. They contracted radiation poisoning as a result of a job that involved applying self-luminous paint to watch dials.
And when five of them challenged their their former employers in court, the prolonged litigation led to landmark changes legitimizing the right of employees to sue on the grounds that they have contracted an occupational disease.
The play, frequently awkward in exposition and shallow in its character-drawing, also has structural problems. Gregory offers a series of episodes that don’t always unfold naturally and instead follow jerkily one after the other and lack even the basic requisites for some kind of cinematic flow. Director Tom Kobolak engages in a failing struggle to deal with this material’s deficiencies and bridge the gaps. Karl Wagner’s set and lighting offer some support — there are, for example some evocative back projections courtesy of Justin Ladelpha— and Brooke Keneford’s soundscape contributes some atmosphere. But one is too conscious of the yawning silences between scenes, of the static moments when characters walk on stage to take up positions before a scene starts, of a sense of a production that is lumbering along in fits and starts.
Most cast members find themselves performing two or more roles, and their contributions often seem interchangeable, given the thinness of their various characterizations. As for those occasional attempts to find more depth in a character, the results are too often arch and mannered. In the latter connection, a sequence involving an appearance by Madame Curie is excruciating to watch.
At the beginning, actress Katrina Soroka is far too tentative in her approach to the role of Grace Fryer, the doomed factory girl whose health crisis provides the play’s focal point. But this performance does gain strength as the evening progresses: a confrontation with her fiancee, well-portrayed by Paul Arbour, achieves emotional credibility, and in a subsequent scene, Soroka brings courage and integrity to the moment when Grace turns down the offer of a paltry financial settlement from the company that has destroyed her life.
In the case of company president Arthur Roeder, actor Bruce Rayfus is working with cardboard, and at the start of the evening his performance is so bland that it almost vanishes into the woodwork. However, by the end of the play, there is some sense of the moral compromises this man has been ready to make in the name of company prosperity, and of the guilt and anguish he now feels. But his performance still pales in comparison with that of Derek Barr who, in his performance of the Radium Corporation’s aggressive vice-president, rises above the general torpor of the evening to deliver an entirely believable display of unrepentant corporate greed. The play is bad polemic, but Barr’s portrayal of a brash corporate monster momentarily makes it seem better than it really is.
Radium Girls by D.W. Gregory
A Kanata Theatre production to Nov. 14.
Director: Tom Kobolak
Sets and Lighting: Karl Wagner
Costumes: Maxine Ball, Marilyn Valiquette
Sound: Brooke Keneford
Katrina Soroka: Grace Fryer
Bruce Rayfuse: Arthur Roeder
Paul LeDuc: Berry/Martland/Flinn/Store Owner
Harold Swaffield: Elderly Widow/Photographer/Markley/Von Sochocky
Emily Walsh: Irene/Miss Wiley/Mrs. Michaels/Board Member #2/
Courtney Roy: Board Member #1/Shopgirl/Kathryn Schaub/Harriet/Cora Middleton
Tracey Nash: Mrs. MacNeil/Mrs. Fryer/Sob Sister/Clerk
Paul Arbour: Tom/Reporter/Dr. Knef/Venecine Salesman
Karen Germundsen: Diane Roeder/Madame Curie/Customer/Board Member #3
Derek Barr: Charlie Lee/ Cecil Drinker/Bailey/Lovesick Cowboy/Male Shopper/Court