In the following essay, Loomis extols the antisexist message ofThe Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds and points out the correlation between Zindel's play and Dante's Divine Comedy.

Already preparing a bridge to such a recent male feminist play as Robert Harling's Steel Magnolias, Paul Zindel, in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Manin-the-Moon Marigolds, gave us, two full decades ago, a strong indictment of sexism. In Zindel's revisionary Dantesque play, the frumpy housewife Beatrice Hunsdorfer may look like an illusionfrustrated female transplanted into a Northern urban landscape from the barren Mississippi River towns of Tennessee Williams. Beatrice's tantrum in Act Two, turning her house into a chaos, may seem fully explained when she declares "I hate the world"; she thus appears at first no more positive a rebel than Kopit's Madame Rosepettle in Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and...