The play with the longest name in town is taking place in the newest and smallest theater in town. "The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds," first performed in 1965, is now playing in the 29-seat, so-far-unnamed theater at California Stage.
Ray Tatar, who recently retired from the California Arts Council, and who directs the three-theater complex (the other two are the 50-seat California Stage and the 80-seat The Space), fashioned the new black-box theater from rehearsal space at the complex and intends it for workshops, one-person productions and intimate plays such as this one.
Penny Meagher directs this unsettling family drama in a way that makes the show's innate discomfort strong but bearable. It's a fine line that she walks expertly.
The awkwardly titled play is by Paul Zindel, who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for it when it was published in 1971. He drew on memories of his own childhood for this story of a troubled household in which an abusive, alcoholic mother warps her children as she struggles against a world that she sees as just waiting to ridicule and attack her.
The protagonist is Tillie (performed by the talented and likable Jackie O'Brien), a science nerd who copes with the chaos around her while keeping her attention on a science fair project on the effects of radiation on plant seeds. Perhaps by winning the science fair, she can gain recognition for something other than being the child of "Betty the Loon," as her mother frequently is referred to.
Tillie is the voice of Zindel in this play. "Our home was a house of fear," he once said. "Mother never trusted anybody." Zindel was teaching high school science – chemistry and physics – when "Gamma Rays" opened. As an undergraduate, he had taken a creative writing course with playwright Edward Albee, but his bachelor's and master's degrees were in chemistry.
Tillie's mother, Beatrice (Deborah Shalhoub in a note-perfect performance), is cruel and erratic. She is not only abusive to her two children – the other daughter, Ruth (Carissa Meagher), has epilepsy – but she demeans and insults the silent old woman (Phyllis Britt, who communicates so much with her expression that she has no need to speak) who boards with the family.
Zindel contrasted Tillie's marigolds – flowers that had been exposed to varying degrees of radiation and had grown abnormally – to the family. When Tillie gushes about the wonders and powers of radiation and mentions the half-life of cobalt 60, her mother says, "If you want to know what a half-life is, you're looking at the original."
Beatrice refers to her daughters as "two stones around my neck," yet Tillie manages to succeed at school and make it into the finals of the science fair. What happens on the night of the fair and what Beatrice does in retaliation is shocking. Even then, Tillie remains a believer in life and hope, convinced that "something beautiful can emerge from even the most barren, afflicted soil."
You wonder how.
Call The Bee's Jim Carnes, (916) 321-1130.
