Word: zindel
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Literal and literary insularity are not easy to achieve in New York City, but Playwright Paul Zindel has done it. He has lived, written and worked as a high school chemistry teacher on the city's lightly populated borough in the bay, Staten Island. Until last week: with a Pulitzer Prize* as a letter of recommendation, and with the pride of bachelorhood as impetus, he boarded a ferry and moved to Manhattan...
...Zindel won the Pulitzer for his off-Broadway play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, wh:ch exemplifies perfectly the editor's admonition to young writers: "Write what you know." The play's three leading characters are a bitter, nearly mad mother and her two tormented daughters; its plot concerns a science-class experiment with radiation on marigolds by one of the daughters. The underlying concept occurred to Zindel while he was preparing a class lecture. "I remember thinking that all carbon atoms on earth had to come from the sun," he says...
...Zindel's mother was a practical nurse who cared for a series of dying patients. He recalls: "We stuffed them intact into plastic bags. She raised a lot of dogs too, but when she got tired of them she would kill them off. We'd bury them in the backyard. Our sunflowers reached heights the likes of which you couldn't believe...
...circumstances belongs to the shy daughter. Tillie, who successfully mounts a science fair project dealing with the effects of radiation on the growth of marigolds. It is as small an event as Laura's dance with the Gentleman Caller in the Williams prototype and just as affecting. Craftily enough Zindel goes on to turn this rinky-dink science fair exhibit into a metaphor that ties the whole work together in a neat and ambivalent fashion by the final curtain...
...metal walking frame throughout the first act: she is a gray vegetable who says nothing, a fleshed-out phantom who serves as a grim reminder of the truly horrible facts of life that may be only a little further around the corner for this pathetic family. Zindel has also fashioned a dramatic structure that allows for no fat; the action moves at breakneck pace and the whole evening lasts only ninety minutes. Let me also point out that Zindel has thankfully failed to provide any sons for Beatrice to emasculate...