The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds | The Idea of Progress

In the following excerpt, Adler notes flaws in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds and comments on the themes of the play.

For critics to call The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, Paul Zindel's Off-Broadway work and the 1971 prize winner, ‘‘honest" or "engaging'' creates the impression that here is a work which pretends to be nothing other than what it is: a stark if overly familiar family-problem play about life's ability to sustain itself against great odds—doing for a particular family something of what [Thornton] Wilder does for the universal family of man in The Skin of Our Teeth. Zindel, though, appears to have pretensions to something more, attempting to...

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