SOURCE: "Female Freedoms, Dantesque Dreams, and Paul Zindel's Anti-Sexist The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds," in Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present, Vol. 6, 1991, pp. 123-33.

In the essay below, Loomis extols the anti-sexist message of The 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 Man-in-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 illusion-frustrated 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...