“It’s a business,” Mathes chimes in. That’s not to say the three haven’t won parts. At the same time, they have learned how stereotyped women’s roles can be. McDowall, for example: With her curly brown hair, curvy figure and husky voice, she’s usually cast as “funny, or bitchy or the sidekick.” “Some roles have been good,” she says—she especially enjoyed a short, independent comedy film she appeared in this year, “Future Assassin.” “And some I just chalk up to experience,” she adds. Although Mathes has struggled to distinguish herself from (in her words) “all the other girls with brown hair and blue eyes,” she has started to find her niche. She enjoyed her work with “School Spirits” for the Syfy network, for example, which reenacts reports of on-campus paranormal events. “It was an amazing experience of what being on set is like,” she says. She spent about six hours in a swimming pool for one episode, doing laps to the point of exhaustion. Is she a swimmer? “Not really,” she says. “That’s why I’m an actor. To experience life from different points of view, to live another life for a few minutes.” Raymond is represented by two agencies, which is a huge step for an actor. She’s in the adult and youth departments—and because of her small frame and highpitched vocal range, she is almost always cast in teenage roles. “I’ve been cast as a character named Minnie,” she laments, and she recently voiced Sally Brown for a “Peanuts” animation. But she has also played Tricia in the play “Dog Sees God,” which reimagines the Peanuts characters (Tricia = Peppermint Patty) as troubled teenagers, at an off-Broadway theater. One reviewer called her “the perfect ‘Mean Girl.’” At the same time, the reality is they also have to have “survival jobs,” as Raymond calls them: McDowall is a wardrobe supervisor—she regularly works for Juilliard and picks up work for organizations like the Joffrey Ballet. She is also a teaching artist at the Harlem School of the Arts, an afterschool program. Mathes works full time at a bar, and Raymond is a maître d’ for a
Why Radium Girls?
restaurant and sells skin-care products. “You need to be able to sit in the middle of this teeter-totter,” says Mathes, holding out her hands like the scales of justice. “And keep them in balance. You are your own enterprise, and you have to treat it as such in order to survive—for your own sanity, and to get in front of the right people.” “You never have a day where you’re not doing something,” says Raymond. “You’re always running, running, running.” Then, they decided to start setting their own pace.
Act Three:
Radium Girls One day late last year, Raymond and Mathes took a scene study class together. It’s the kind of thing motivated actors do to keep themselves sharp. While rehearsing, they got to talking—and dreaming. “We said, you know, let’s do something we can be in control of,” recalls Raymond. McDowall joined in the conversation about roles they’d like to take on, books they had read and plays that had inspired them, in particular, plays in which female characters were not just talking about shopping or men. Within a month, they had held a launch party for their new company, The Radium Girls (TRG), named in honor of an inspiring group of women from the early 20th century (see sidebar). “The great thing about TRG is that each girl brings something interesting and necessary to the spectrum,” says Kashana Young, one of the company’s major backers. “There is nothing these girls can’t do. If there is, thankfully for us, they know their limitations. TRG are grounded and realistic and do not waste time with fanciful dreams.” There was no time for “fanciful dreams” between TRG’s launch party in December 2012 and the May 22, 2013, opening of their first show, Alan Ball’s comedy “Five Women Wearing the Same Dress,” at Manhattan’s Bridge Theatre. The three pulled together and did everything from securing
a theater to learning their parts to casting the other roles to selling tickets. “Our professors always told us about this,” says Raymond. “‘You’re going to be doing theater in the smallest spaces. You’re going to be sweeping the floors yourself, doing your own hair.’ For this show, I was hanging wallpaper, sweeping floors, acting and producing. I was like, ‘Wow, this is exactly what they were talking about!’” They swept up quite a few talented collaborators along the way and inspired them to donate their time and talents—people like Jaime Torres, a friend of McDowall from her wardrobing work, who did the costume design. It’s a key position in a play that revolves around five bridesmaids for a Southern summer wedding. “[The dresses are] supposed to be tacky without actually looking terrible,” Torres explains. He located peach-colored readymade dresses and added lace and beads to fit the part, and created hats for them as well. “I logged a lot of hours,” he says with a laugh. “It was a lot of hand-sewing. But I had a very personal connection to the show and wanted to give them the best they could get.” The work paid off. Two among the attendees of their sold-out audiences were Henry and Jo Strouss, who got to know Mathes from her “survival job” as a bartender and have become her patrons. “It is easy in New York just to go to performances on Broadway,” says Henry, “but it is critical for young performers to enter the profession for the art to survive. Working on a shoestring budget, these young women put on a highly enjoyable show.” For The Radium Girls, though, the biggest triumph lies in the opportunity they took to define themselves. “When your vision, your point of view is clear, everything falls into place. That’s what they don’t teach you in school,” Mathes says. “Cultivating your own importance, your own way of doing things, is when you hit gold.” Laura Barlament is a New York-based freelance writer and editor of Wagner Magazine at Wagner College in Staten Island.
While Jacqueline Raymond, Kelsey Mathes and Amanda McDowall were mulling over a name
for their new venture, Mathes heard a podcast and McDowall read the book “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” by Siddhartha Mukherjee, which includes the story of the early-20th-century female factory workers known as the Radium Girls. These young women worked for the United States Radium Corporation in Orange, N.J., painting watch dials with radium-laced paint—a substance the company deceitfully told them was harmless. After they contracted cancers, some of the women fought back in the courts and won. Their efforts led to groundbreaking worker-protection laws. www.alumni.buffalo.edu UBTODAY Fall 2013
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