"The Girls Who Glow" at Yorktown High School Auditorium

The Girls Who Glow, by Ginny Mohler
Adapted and performed by Yorktown High School Theatre Program

Please join Yorktown Theatre IV class’ as they present a one-act play, The Girls Who Glow. It is a compelling and historically significant story.

February 11, 2016 @  7:00 pm
Yorktown High School Auditorium
5200 Yorktown Boulevard
Arlington, VA  22207

This past fall, the Yorktown Theatre Department had the opportunity to work with Ginny Mohler, an NYU-Alfred P. Sloan feature film grant winner, who also happens to be an alumnus of the Arlington Public School system! Ms. Mohler, a YHS theatre student (Yorktown ’06) who graduated from the NYU Tisch film school in 2011, has written a captivating screenplay about the real-life “Radium Girls” – teenage factory workers who were slowly poisoned while painting glow-in-the-dark watches with radium. The Theatre Arts IV class adapted her screenplay into a one-act play entitled The Girls Who Glow, which they performed in October (to “glowing” reviews), and which they prepared for the Virginia High School League competition on January 16th.

The Girls Who Glow is based on an historical tragedy most people have never heard of, but which is both instructive as a history lesson and useful as a framework for discussing modern-day health and safety issues. During the early 20 ^th century, teenage girls were hired by several U.S. companies to paint watches to make them glow in the dark for use in war. The paint was made with radium, known at the time by scientists to be toxic, particularly because the girls were encouraged to lick the brushes to maintain fine points, and thus ingested the paint. The truth about the radium-laden paint’s dangers was hidden for many years, as the companies sought to profit from the sale of the glowing watches and other radium-containing products. While hundreds of young girls fell ill and many died -- from cancers caused by working with the paint – six girls decided to sue U.S. Radium Corp. for slowly poisoning them on the job. In the face of increasing public outcry as the truth emerged, the company decided to settle and the Radium Girls were left with meager settlements and lives cut short by the toxic paint.

We think this is an important story to tell, and we look forward to bringing this compelling story to light for you.