Interview with Playwright, D.W. Gregory

Who or what inspired you to become a writer?

I started writing novels when I was 10 years old, writing in pencil in a 5-cent notebook. I filled up the notebooks with stories about orphans and ghosts. Not sure what the inspiration for that was. Literature had been part of my life from the time I was old enough to read and earlier -- because my parents and older siblings used to read to the younger ones. We had well-worn copies of Childcraft books, filled with poetry and short stories and articles about science and the weather. So from a very young age I had a vague notion that I wanted to be a writer, but no idea how to make a living at it until I went to college and discovered a course in journalism. After that my path was set. I got an internship on the local paper, then found a series of jobs at small weeklies, then dailies, where I worked as a reporter.

Playwriting was a late inspiration. I'd always liked theatre; I thought the coolest job on earth would be a theatre critic because you'd get paid to go see plays! When I was working in the Midwest, I got involved in some community theatre, just for fun, as an actor (not a very good actor) and when I moved to upstate New York found a playwriting workshop advertised in the newspaper. It was the dead of winter, I was bored, and it looked like a good way to meet other theatre enthusiasts. So I signed up and I've been writing plays ever since.

What do you consider to be your greatest achievements as a playwright?

I keep hoping they are yet to come! The continued success of Radium Girls is certainly the biggest surprise to me. It's had nearly 1,000 productions -- maybe more than that by now -- mostly in educational settings. I never wrote it with schools in mind, but last year, Dramatics Magazine named it among the 10 most produced plays in U.S. high schools. So a lot of people obviously see it as suitable for young actors; I never did, but I can see why it works for the schools and why young people find it fun to do.

This year I have a new play that is getting a rolling world premiere through the National New Play Network. That's a bit of a coup for me; my first, and I hope, not my last, but you never know. The play is called Memoirs of a Forgotten Man, and opened at Contemporary American Theatre Festival last summer and will be produced at Shadowland Stages in upstate New York and New Jersey Rep in Long Branch NJ this summer.

What was your inspiration for writing Radium Girls?

I've known about the dialpainters since I was a kid. My fifth grade teacher told me the story of the girls tipping the brushes on their lips -- and I was horrified. How could something like that happen? It was the first time I was confronted with the idea that men in authority maybe could not be trusted to do the right thing. That was in 1968, a year in which a lot of men in authority did not do the right thing -- but I was barely aware of what was going on in the world outside home and school.

I never forgot the story, and years later, after I had started writing plays, I came across an article about the New Jersey cases. That was the immediate inspiration to write the play -- something clicked and I decided I would tell the story on stage.

While writing this play, did you find that you related to a specific character? If so, how?

I definitely related to Grace, as a young woman trying to live up to the expectations of family and community, who finds herself thrust into a position to have to challenge the men in authority. But I also was fascinated by Arthur Roeder -- a true believer who cannot accept the facts and so goes out in search of "alternative facts" to support his denial.

What were the challenges (research, literary, psychological, and logistical) in bringing Radium Girls to life?

The biggest challenge was figuring out the structure that worked. I went back and forth for a long time, shuffling scenes, changing my mind, going back again -- until I settled on the current structure. Research wasn't hard -- there was a lot of material at the Library of Congress -- it just took time. From the beginning I knew I wanted a play with two trains on the tracks -- Grace's story and Roeder's story -- and that each was the hero of their own story, and that they served as each other's antagonist. Figuring out how to weave all that together was a heavy lift. But no one told me I couldn't do it or shouldn't do it -- so eventually through trial and error I figured out a structure that seems to work.

Do you have anything you want to say to an audience watching Radium Girls?

A question that comes up a lot is why Roeder is written the way he is. There seems to be an expectation that he should be presented as a pure villain because he does terrible things, but the play forces us to see his point of view, even to sympathize with him. My answer is that everyone, no matter who they are, acts in self-interest and finds ways to justify themselves. Roeder is no different. He thought of himself as a great guy. To his family and friends, he probably was a great guy. He believed he was protecting his investors. He was protecting himself. He found ways to lie to himself and then lied to other people in order to avoid having to face the ugliest truth -- his own culpability. So ultimately, Radium Girls is a play about denial. It doesn't excuse him or exonerate him -- but it is an attempt to explain him. And I think it makes for better drama.

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