Even before “These Shining Lives” by Melanie Marnich delivers its opening lines, the video display at The Stagecrafters Theater captures your attention. Numerous products, like pictures from an antique Sears Roebuck catalog, flick across the rear stage wall.

Everything from asthma and dropsy solutions to beauty products promotes radium. Madame Curie herself touted its potential health benefits. Time and events have proved otherwise. When ingested, even small quantities of radium can induce necrotic tumors in human bones.

That was the fate of dozens of young women who worked in the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois. Melanie Marnich dramatizes their true story in “These Shining Lives” (2008). Attracted by high wages, scores of women painted a radium compound onto watch dials to make the numbers shine. They used the company’s “lip-pointing” technique, which involved licking fine-haired brushes to sharpen their strokes.

With an affecting deadpan mien, Greta Groothuis plays Catherine Donohue, the central character who narrates the story from beyond the grave. Donohue was a true historical figure, the principal litigant in the lawsuit brought against Radium Dial and whose deathbed testimony in 1938 drew national attention.

The four women in the play were historical friends and co-workers at the factory. While Catherine was the lead plaintiff, all supported the action. “Shining Lives,” a 90-minute show played without intermission, takes the time to develop a portrait of their differences and relationships.

Rakael Audrey shines as Charlotte, an opinionated and forceful character. Initially, spirited Charlotte resists Catherine’s entry into her coterie of factory friends. But as the radium danger emerges, Charlotte’s stature shrinks, underscoring Catherine’s character arc as the emerging group leader.

Pearl, too, is high-spirited but not in Charlotte’s insistent way. Lee Tomanelli plays her as a party girl. You think of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls just wanna have fun” as Pearl breaks into silly songs or tells knock-knock jokes. Haley De Luna plays Frances as a character full of an undefinable moral gravitas, never the leader but exerting a presence that holds the group together.

Tom (Michael Eddy Harvey), Catherine’s husband, and Mr. Reed (Daniel Crozier), the lead supervisor for the Radium Dial Company, dramatize the familial suffering and the corporate corruption. Even the townsfolk of small Ottawa come under scrutiny when they ostracize the girls because their lawsuit jeopardizes a needed employer during the 1930s’ Great Depression.

Earlier, “The Radium Girls” (2000) dramatized the same issue of radium poisoning. This play by D.W. Gregory concerned poisoning at the United States Radium Corporation factory in Orange, N.J. It involves a larger cast and proceeds in documentary fashion.

Playwright Marnich focuses on the tragedy’s effect on intimate relationships and develops an imagistic use of time. Watches measure time, the poisoning needs time to mature, core relationships change over time, the event occurs during the Depression era, and the lawsuit took years to play out.

Director Jane Toczek uses the time image to good effect. Clocks and watches tick as halcyon videos of the girls on the beaches of Lake Michigan darken and fade. You travel from death into a panorama of the timeless, starry heavens.

Catherine won a settlement shortly before she died. Her case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and established the employees’ right to sue their employers for unsafe labor practices.

Decades later, the lawsuit helped create the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). “These Shining Lives” is “timely” as OSHA is under political attack today, and it is gratifying to see a consequential event handled with poetic elegance.

The Stagecrafters Theater is located at 8130 Germantown Ave. “These Shining Lives” will run through Oct 4. Tickets are available at 215-247-8881 or online.