Prizewinning Marigolds

Literal and literary insularity are not easy to achieve in New York City, but Playwright Paul Zindel has done it. He has lived, written and worked as a high school chemistry teacher on the city's lightly populated borough in the bay, Staten Island. Until last week: with a Pulitzer Prize* as a letter of recommendation, and with the pride of bachelorhood as impetus, he boarded a ferry and moved to Manhattan.

Zindel won the Pulitzer for his off-Broadway play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, wh:ch exemplifies perfectly the editor's admonition to young writers: "Write what you know." The play's three leading characters are a bitter, nearly mad mother and her two tormented daughters; its plot concerns a science-class experiment with radiation on marigolds by one of the daughters. The underlying concept occurred to Zindel while he was preparing a class lecture. "I remember thinking that all carbon atoms on earth had to come from the sun," he says. "The idea of being linked to the universe by these atoms, which really don't die, gave me a feeling of meaning." The mother was his own, he says, "in nightmarish exaggeration."

Zindel's mother was a practical nurse who cared for a series of dying patients. He recalls: "We stuffed them intact into plastic bags. She raised a lot of dogs too, but when she got tired of them she would kill them off. We'd bury them in the backyard. Our sunflowers reached heights the likes of which you couldn't believe."

It is only a 20-minute, five-mile trip from Staten Island to Manhattan, but when Zindel made it last week, it represented his emancipation. "Now maybe I'll be able to start living. Whoever I am was squashed," he says. Some public evidence of the past lingers; Zindel has another play, this one on Broadway, called And Miss Rear don Drinks a Little--about three sisters, all teachers. He is working on two plays, one the book for a musical, from the perspective of a new present and unknown future.

One path he seems determined to avoid is that taken by another Pulitzer winner and one of Zindel's playwriting models, Edward Albee, whose work since he won his prize in 1967 has displeased most reviewers. Says Zindel: "Albee is an example of what happens when one receives a prize and spends too much time shopping for antiques and wallpapering one's bathroom with velour. He's also an example of a playwright who doesn't listen to those who can give him objectivity."

Zindel's exploration of a deep, narrow shaft of his life recalls Henry David Thoreau's rejoinder to those who urged he broaden his perspective through travel: "I have traveled a good deal in Concord." Zindel says rightly that despite the psychologically crippled characters and lacerating tensions in Marigolds, it is an affirmation of life--the experimenting schoolgirl endures literally and symbolically, despite the emotional violence around her. Like her, Zindel has transcended his experience. Thoreau eventually went as far as Minnesota. For Zindel, Manhattan may be far enough; it is the inner distance that counts.

* Among other Pulitzer winners: James MacGregor Burns, history award for Roosevelt: the Soldier of Freedom; Mario Davidovsky, music award for a mixed-medium composition; William S. Merwin, poetry, for The Carrier of Ladders; the New York Times's Harold C. Schonberg, criticism; Lucinda Franks and Thomas Powers of United Press International, national reporting; Jimmie Lee Hoagland of the Washington Post, international, reporting; the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal and Sentinel, public service; the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, for Kent State coverage.

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