“These Shining Lives” — Hey, I’m in a Play!

“These Shining Lives,” by Melanie Marnich

If you find yourself in the Southern Tier of upstate New York this weekend, wend your way to Binghamton’s Phelps Mansion and see your’s truly in another play. Southern Tier Actors Read (S.T.A.R.) is putting on a staged reading of “These Shining Lives” by Melanie Marnich.

The play highlights an important true saga from labor history in the US. In the 1920s and 1930s the Radium Dial Company employed young women to paint the numbers on watches and clocks with radium paint — licking the brush before every stroke.

Constant exposure to radioactive material led to their deaths by various cancers a few years later. Some of the women lived long enough to fight the case all the way to the Supreme Court.

Here’s a link to a short TV spot on the production.

Here’s a link to a radio interview with the director, Barbara Vartanian.

I honestly don’t know if any of my readers actually live in the Binghamton/Broome County area — but if you do, and if you come, please say hello after the show!

Friday 6/30 and Saturday 7/1 at 7:30. Sunday 7/2 at 2:00.