Review: Trouble Puppet Theater Co.’s Undark: A Radioactive Puppet Play

Norma Rae’s Crystal Lee Sutton. Hidden Figures’ Mary Jackson. North Country’s Lois Jenson. These groundbreaking women and their inspiring David vs. Goliath battles with the Man over workers’ rights, segregation, and sexual harassment didn’t become common knowledge until their stories were turned into books, then major motion pictures.

The same is true for the Radium Girls, a corps of female factory workers in the 1920s who were poisoned from painting watch dials with a newly invented radium-based luminescent paint. Corporate executives looked at the illness as collateral damage and conspiratorial company doctors diagnosed it as syphilis or diphtheria. The workers’ attempts to receive compensation for medical expenses from U.S. Radium were futile and met with blatant acts of intimidation. But by 1927, after more than 50 women had died, Grace Fryer filed a lawsuit along with four other dial painters for damages of $250,000. They received significantly less, and none would survive more than two years after the settlement due to their sickness.

The film Radium Girls was released in 2018, preceded by several biographical and historical fiction novels, a few documentaries, stage plays, published poems, and the song “Radium Girl” by the Scottish band Idlewild. So, the question to ask while attending the Trouble Puppet Theater Company’s staging of Undark: A Radioactive Puppet Play – an original workshop production crafted by Connor Hopkins and funded by a 2021 grant from the Jim Henson Foundation – is, what does a single tabletop puppet set against a backdrop of projected shadow puppetry bring to the story and the storytelling that these other efforts don’t?

The answer: lots.

The mere novelty of a person with radiation poisoning being played by a puppet – particularly one as detailed and seemingly fragile as Hopkins’ creation – manages to draw and then hold your attention even when the horrific story being told makes you want to look away. And her curtailed and understated movements, along with the manually manipulated shadow imagery of other factory workers behind her – courtesy of puppeteers Tam King, Catherine Collett, Aileen Adler, and Melissa Vogt – form a subtle yet expressive shorthand that says so much more than an actor’s performance in a conventional “meat theatre” production ever could.

Sound designer K. Eliot Haynes supplements the puppetry with a flowing soundtrack and supplies a voiceover narrative (recorded by Vogt) that was inspired by Grace Fryer’s court testimony. The disembodied voice of a victim dramatically heightens the words and emphasizes their significance. And the period-appropriate ads promoting the health benefits of radium, which are part of Chris Owen’s projections, add a bit of irony to the evening.

According to artistic director and puppet master Hopkins during the opening night after-show discussion, the act of puppetry itself is an operational metaphor for the manipulation of one being by another. This adds weight to every one of his productions, which tend to address social and economic injustice. With this play’s exploration of a faceless corporation’s shocking criminal negligence and the misogynistic system that protected it, the medium is very much the message.

In addition to workshop grants, the Jim Henson Foundation offers funding for full productions of new works. Undark: A Radioactive Puppet Play will most certainly be a viable and worthy candidate when it gets (pardon the expression) more fully fleshed out. Those attending this workshop staging will be offered 2-for-1 tickets for the full production.

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Undark: A Radioactive Puppet Play

The Vortex, 2307 Manor Rd., vortexrep.org
Through June 11
Running time: 45 mins.