Newtown High School (NHS) students are in the final stretch preparing for their fall drama, Radium Girls, set to open Thursday, November 12.

Performances will be staged in the auditorium of the high school, 12 Berkshire Road, with evening performances at 7 pm Thursday through Saturday, November 12-14, and a matinee performance at 2 pm Sunday, November 15.

Tickets are $12 for adults, $10 for seniors and students, and are available at nhsc.booktix.com.

Radium Girls is a play set in and around Orange, New Jersey, between 1918 and 1928, and is inspired by the true story of young factory workers who painted watch dials for the war effort. These women were told that, in between painting numbers for the watch dials, they needed to put the paintbrush in between their lips to make it pointed. However, in doing so, the women had no idea they were working with radioactive paint and experienced radium poisoning.

Years later, when these women mysteriously began falling ill, they refused to accept the easy answers they were given and sued their employer.

According to NHS teacher Janice Gabriel, who is directing Radium Girls alongside high school seniors Elizabeth Huizar and Talmage Bacon, the show centers on women who refused to give up, even in the face of illness and scrutiny, and a company manager realizing he is ultimately to blame.

Needless to say, Gabriel called Radium Girls a crazy story.

"I was actually just talking with one of the other teachers, and she's like, 'I never even heard of this until I read the book ... and how, as a Connecticut school kid, did I not know about this when it was also happening in Waterbury," Gabriel said.

While the show is primarily set in New Jersey, some of the women were transferred to Waterbury Clock Company in Connecticut, where they were also being poisoned with radium.

Gabriel said Radium Girls is a show she has been looking at for a couple years. Originally, she had gone back and forth between it and another show for the high school's fall drama, but Gabriel ultimately chose Radium Girls.

"It's such a timely show, even though it's from the 1920's," Gabriel said. "The story is all about blind faith and how we so often do what we're told. And yet, these women eventually chose to fight back, even though that wasn't the thing to do at the time, especially for women."

Some of the show's themes even made their way into the production's set design. Gabriel said she and the students talked extensively about their characters and observed a clock motif throughout the show, as these girls were essentially running out of time. As such, she said there will be a hanging clock that will actually be moving in the back of the stage.

Additionally, different platforms will be used to represent different parts of the stories. One of these is a circular platform on the ground used for many of the show's factory scenes, designed to almost mirror the hanging clock in the background.

When researching for Radium Girls, Gabriel said she learned that radium glowed. Years after the events of the show, researchers kept some of the jawbones of the young factory workers in the name of science, and they were still glowing green.

As such, Gabriel and the students knew the show would need glowing elements. She said they will install black lights underneath the center platform, which will trigger some of the UV-activated makeup on the actors’ faces.

She added, "When you've got something like deteriorating jaws, that has these people get sicker and sicker throughout the show, a lot of the experimenting and learning we've done throughout the show is, 'How do we make this happen?' It's a learning experience not only for the students, but also for me."

In the weeks before opening night, many NHS students could be spotted in the school's auditorium, hard at work finalizing the set and running their lines. Bacon said co-directing the show has been awesome, adding that he really got to learn about all the behind-the-scenes elements that go into making these shows happen.

For Huizar, who has been a production manager in the past, she said directing has given her the opportunity to combine her creative input and work with other people to bring a great historic story to life.

Gabriel thanked all of the students for their hard work, as well as Ingersoll Auto of Danbury for serving as the show's Title Sponsor.

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Reporter Jenna Visca can be reached at jenna@thebee.com.