SOURCE: "Shopworn," in The New Yorker, Vol. XL VII, No. 3, 6 March 1971, pp. 67-8.

Here, Gill assesses And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little as "so shopworn in form, so flyblown in content, that one would suppose it had been written several decades ago by a bookish hermit thoroughly out of touch with the theatrical innovations of even his day."

Having been radically overpraised last year for a not very robust pastiche of early Tennessee Williams called The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, Paul Zindel now risks being underdamned for his And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little, at the Morosco. The risk springs from a sorry fact about reviewing: to keep from being seen to have loved an earlier work not wisely but too well, reviewers encountering a later work that they don't like at all tend to mask their dislike and let the playwright sink by controlled...