[Nstc] Radium Girls and Love Letters Performances

[ceil at zianet.com]

Radium Girls by D.W. Gregory and directed by Autumn Gieb, continues its  
successful run at the Black Box Theatre, 430 N Main Street in Las Cruces.  
Mike Cook's excellent review is in this weeks's edition of The Bulletin.  
Remaining performances of Radium Girls are Thursday, February 10 at 7:00  
p.m., Friday, February 11 at 8:00 p.m., Saturday, February 12 at 8:00 p.m.  
and Sunday, February 13 at 2:30 p.m.

In 1926, radium was a miracle cure, Madame Curie an international
celebrity, and luminous watches the latest rage—until the girls who
painted them began to fall ill with a mysterious disease. Inspired by a
true story, Radium Girls traces the efforts of Grace Fryer, a dial
painter, as she fights for her day in court. Her chief adversary is her
former employer, Arthur Roeder, an idealistic man who cannot bring
himself to believe that the same element that shrinks tumors could have
anything to do with the terrifying rash of illnesses among his employees.
As the case goes on, however, Grace finds herself battling not just with
the U.S. Radium Corporation, but with her own family and friends, who
fear that her campaign for justice will backfire.


No Strings Theatre Company presents Love Letters on Monday, February 14 at  
8:00 p.m. It has been a number of years since NSTC last presented A. R.  
Gurney's enchanting reading. The play has gained a unique reputation all  
over the United States and overseas owing to the celebrity casts who  
performed it throughout the 1990s. This year the play will be performed by  
local celebrity actors Marissa Bond and Rafael Medina reading the roles of  
Melissa Gardner and Andrew Makepeace Ladd III. Bond and Medina performed  
together in LCCT's The Mousetrap 10 years ago, and more recently in NSTC's  
Nora. In 2020, Bond directed Ionesco's oddly prophetic play, The Killing  
Game, about a plague before COVID shut all the theatres down in March.

Love Letters is a truly unique and imaginative theatre piece which, in the  
words of playwright Gurney, "needs no theatre, no lengthy rehearsal, no  
special set, no memorization of lines, and no commitment from its two  
actors beyond the night of performance." The letters, as the actors read  
them aloud, create an evocative, touching, frequently funny, but always  
telling pair of character studies. The Wall Street Journal called Love  
Letters "the love affair of a lifetime" and "an exhilarating, funny, moving  
event," while Time Magazine lauded it as "one of the best American plays of  
the decade," and the New York Times praised it as "wittily, irresistibly  
moving."

Tickets are available for both Radium Girls and Love Letters online at  
www.no-strings.org and by calling (575) 523-1223.