SOURCE: "The Idea of Progress," in Mirror on the Stage: The Pulitzer Plays as an Approach to American Drama, Purdue University Press, 1987, pp. 127-41.

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-inthe-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 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 impart additional weight to his basically simple characterization and content...