By Emily Hale
Managing Editor

Walled Lake Central’s drama students are preparing to raise the lights for the upcoming fall play, Radium Girls. The production is set to take place December 1-3 at 7pm. Tickets will be sold a few weeks before the performances. They can be bought at the door, at the ticket booth during the week before the performances, and online.

Auditions were being held September 19-23. Those trying out memorized and recited a monologue while making it their own in front of director and English teacher Elizabeth Rexroat, sophomore Taylor Dawood, and senior Amy Al-Abawi.

Playing the main leads are seniors Renata Terrazzan and Drew Pype. The other leads include senior Marjorie Tubie and sophomore Maddie Strong as Kathryn and Irene and senior Christian Bashi, junior Jack Gibson, and junior Malachi Graybill as Charlie Lee, Tom Freider, and Edward Markley. Others include senior Mandy Ta, junior Dakotah Atkinson, senior Violet Wesenberg, senior Patrice Linman, senior Annie Laster and many more.

Gibson said, “The play is coming along very well, the cast are all amazing at acting and I’m excited for when we pull it all together to portray the massive amount of emotion that comes along with Radium Girls.”

After doing comedies for the past three years,  Rexroat decided to do a drama this year. Radium Girls is based on the real story of the 1920’s Radium Girls, through which the dangers of radium were finally discovered. The play focuses on the Radium Girls’ quest for justice.

The play focuses on the lives of female factory workers, Grace (Terrazzan) and her two best friends Kathryn (Tubie) and Irene (Strong). These workers were employed by Arthur Roeder (Pype), in a factory where they painted the dials on watches In doing so, they would dip the brush in the radium paint and to make a point they would lick it. Not knowing its dangerous effects, they ingested large doses of radium, which gave them cancer, caused them to lose their jaws, and eventually die.

When many of the other girls start to die and Grace and Kathryn become ill, the girls become suspicious and visit a variety of dentists and doctors (senior John Faubert, freshman Quinn Hysni, and sophomore Dylan Mostyn). Realizing that the cause is the radium, Grace tries to sue the plant and Mr. Roeder, but because of politics and his desire to keep up his reputation, Mr. Roeder, with the help of his lawyer Charlie Lee (Bashi), lies about the real effects of radium.