'Shining' casts small light on the ordinary

Playwright Melanie Marnich carves out a thin slice of common humanity from the epic lode of social and economic injustice. "These Shining Lives," in a spare and well-acted production at History Theatre in St. Paul, explores the lives of four women who became ill after years of painting luminous dials on watches for the Radium Dial company near Chicago. Principally, Marnich focuses on Catherine Donohue, the lightning rod of a 1930s class-action suit that made employers liable for the health of employees.

Stacia Rice portrays Donohue, rail thin and eager to become a "working girl" in 1928. She's giddy at the prospect of earning $8 a day for dabbing bits of radium onto a watch face. Soon, she bonds with Charlotte (Ann Michels), Pearl (Jamila Anderson) and Frances (Simone Perrin). They compete on the job, loll on the beach, sip hooch and dream about their long lives together. Given our foreknowledge of the outcome, however, Marnich makes it a bit too easy to target the exact moment that this joy will turn sour.

The women twirled paintbrushes in their lips to sharpen the tip while they worked. Hence, their radiant glow was anything but healthy. Donohue contracted bone cancer, a result of the radium poisoning, and eventually won an award of $5,000, 21 days before she died in 1938.

This seems an intentionally small piece of drama. Director Ron Peluso uses a blue and gold set design with a few chairs and tables, to tell a memory tale narrated in rotation by the players. Peluso's actors are light in their emotions, economic in their gestures (save Michels' distinction as the slightly pompous Charlotte). With slim accents of sound and light, the entirety feels elegant but underwhelming.

There is an upside, though. One really gets the sense of ordinary people, content in their lives, who stumble into extraordinary circumstances. Banality allows emotional moments to strike with unexpected authenticity. Rice's Donohue feels very real in her lonely and fragile fight against the system. She is strong, no doubt, in her convictions but it is a strength built on courage, rather than histrionics. Her friends and her husband (Brian Goranson) support her with the only power they possess: working-class grit.

Whether this play will lodge in the brain is uncertain. It just doesn't have the staged heft or the dramaturgical style to transcend its scope. But for a brief moment in time, it does shine.

Graydon Royce • 612-673-7299