SOURCE: "Troubled Times for a Teen;" in New York Post, 7 April 1989.

Here, Barnes discusses the various themes in Amulets Against the Dragon Forces.

Paul Zindel is one of those unfortunate playwrights best-known for his first play—The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, an unnerving and sensitive study of survival through a stricken childhood in a dysfunctional family.

Now, in his newest play, Amulets Against the Dragon Forces at the Circle Repertory Company, Zindel has returned to similar themes of adolescence, alienation and survival.

It has the same quality of compassion of Moon Marigolds, although perhaps it now less convincingly pulls those threads of memory strands that 20 years ago gave the earlier play its resonances of Tennessee Williams and hints of a grand maturity.

The beleagured protagonist of Amulets (Zindel has not lost his taste for provocatively teasing titles) is a young boy, Chris (Matt McGrath).

He...