Cave of Terrified Mutants

Cremation is not confined to the dead. There are families in which people burn each other to a crisp daily and dance with desolate glee in the ashes. Despite its title, which suggests arch avant-garde whimsy, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds is a lacerating account of just such a household.

The mother (Sada Thompson) is a widow from whom all love of life has departed. She hates the world, she hates her lot, and she vents her arid spleen in sardonic wisecracks that are meant to --and do--raise welts on the minds and hearts of her two vulnerable young daughters. The elder daughter (Amy Levitt), an incipient slut, has been pushed past the edge of mental stability, and at moments of extreme stress goes into convulsive spasms. Since any display of affection is cauterized by the mother's tongue, the younger daughter (Pamela Payton-Wright) lavishes her care and love on a plump white rabbit.

Even in this emotionally scorched earth, the younger girl is like a plant reaching up tenaciously toward the sun of knowledge. She has a relish for science, and her sympathetic science teacher has encouraged her to conduct the experiment of growing marigold seeds that have been subjected to gamma rays. When she is asked to deliver a small speech on the subject in her high school auditorium, the cauldron of the mother's repressions, frustrations, aborted love and accumulated venom boils over.

Perceptive Ambience. Mutation is the master metaphor with which Playwright Paul Zindel links the worlds of botany and humanity. Some of the marigolds are withered, some aberrant, and some blossom handsomely. So it is in the family. It is difficult to know where praise of Marigolds should begin or end, and how to contain it. Sada Thompson may already have stolen the Obie award. Her acerb slatternly mother, gobbling cigarettes and guzzling whisky, might simply have been a mutilating monster--except that every other word and gesture reveals the maimed woman inside. The daughter roles are charged with compassion by Levitt and Payton-Wright.

The ultimate accolade must go to Paul Zindel for creating a psychologically perceptive ambience. Shame hangs in the air of this house as palpably as poison gas. The home is never cleaned or tidied up, not because doing either is physically or economically impossible, but because the members of the family are psychically paralyzed. The ring of the telephone is like a scream that petrifies, and the thought of a neighbor paying a visit is as horrifying as a storm trooper battering at the door in the night. In this cave of terrified mutants, the judgments of the outside world arrive as abrasive jeers. To savage the mother, the older daughter tells her that she is known to the neighbors as "Betty the Loon." And yet, Zindel reminds us, strong, strange, beautiful flowers spring from such compost heaps. It is a troubling thought, one of the honest and intelligent values of this splendid and tormented play.

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