Elevate with Dignity: DW Gregory on Intimate Exposures

By: Ryan Elmore ('26), Editor-in-Chief

DW Gregory, the acclaimed playwright and author of Radium Girls, premiered a new play, Intimate Exposures, on November 8 that ran through November 17. Set in 1892, the play, commissioned by Reading Theater Project and directed by Jody Reppert, tells the story of a real photographer named William Goldman who operated in Reading and embarked on a project of photographing local prostitutes.

The play follows Goldman’s fictional relationship with one of his muses, Edie, and lets audiences experience a Reading brothel, and the characters who patron and profit from it, juxtaposing the brothel environment with the stifling social standards of the gilded age.

The play was first imagined when Vicki Haller Graff, the artistic director of Reading Theater Project came across the book Working Girls: An American Brothel Circa 1892 which contained some of Goldman’s photographs. “I was initially intrigued by the subject matter,” Gregory said, “Vicki, the producer, she and I talked about applying to a grant available for ensemble theaters to develop a play and she presented this project to me, something she had already been thinking about.”

Although skeptical at first, Gregory was struck by how subversive the photographs were. “I was driven by the curiosity of these photos because they’re really not what you would expect. Somebody is taking pictures in a brothel, and you expect a lot of ‘dirty’ pictures but that’s really not what he was doing,” she said. “He was looking at these women through an artist’s eye.” After they received the grant, Gregory got to work.

Gregory was certainly familiar with writing historical fiction. Her most popular work, Radium Girls, which has been produced over 2000 times tells the story of a group of women who were poisoned while working for the

United States Radium Corporation and the lawsuit that followed. Her plays typically call attention to systemic power imbalances and injustice and seek to represent voices that have been historically marginalized. Intimate Exposures is no different. After familiarizing herself with Goldman’s photographs, she had meetings with other creatives of the Reading Theater Project to discuss what the project would become. She said, “We talked about the photographs, what they conveyed to us – it was really a conversation around theme. One of the things we did was a writing exercise where you pick a word and put it at the center of a paper and then whatever next word comes to mind you write down and you develop a branch of words.”

At the end of these brainstorming sessions, the collaborators were left with two words that stuck out among the rest: elevate and dignity. “This informed my thinking about the play. [Goldman] really does give them their dignity, they’re not degrading. In some cases, there is this sense that he’s doing honor to some of these women with these images and there is a sense of elevation.”

When it became clear where Gregory wanted to take the play, she began her research. With exceptions like Goldman and Sal Shearer, a real woman who operated the brothel wherein much of the action of the play takes place, many of the characters are made up for the play. Although there were many women photographed, not much was known about those specific women. Goldman never disclosed this project and never kept a journal, so Gregory needed to imagine the details of the women photographed.

“The driving question for me was ‘how does it change you if someone looks at you in a way you’ve never really seen yourself,” Gregory said. “It’s easier to deal with what we’re wrestling with now by going to the past.” She felt the story carried truths that still rang true today. “It was a time of great income inequality, as we have today. [There was] the growth of the millionaire class in the gilded age. Today it’s the billionaire class. [There were] a handful of very wealthy people who had a lot of resources and money and then a lot of working people who feel like they were locked out of the country’s prosperity.”

Many present-day social issues, she believes, make the play relevant. “With the Dobbs decision, the revoking of Roe v. Wade, suddenly we’re back having a conversation about things that we thought had been settled 50 years ago.” She notes a building culture that encourages repression, saying “There’s so much energy being put into a lot of anti-Trans bills and even an-