The effects of Kansas City Actors Theatre on Paul Zindel’s Marigolds

Kansas City Actors Theatre opens its 10th season with a flash of atomic power. Its production of Paul Zindel’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, now playing at the Living Room, offers a heartfelt reminder that enormous energy can come from the smallest things — the atom, say, or the optimism of an odd-duck girl.

Despite its wide critical acclaim — the script earned the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for drama — Marigolds has always felt to me like an outlier. From its motifs (radioactive isotopes and our atomic connection to the sun) to its conflict (contained and internal) to its gender breakdown (five women, one male rabbit), the quiet play remains novel four decades on. It has endured because Zindel’s low-key but lyrical writing is so character-driven. The underdogs he creates feel real to us, and we invest in them fully.

The play begins in the ramshackle home of the Hunsdorfer women, a poor family in the 1960s joined more by dysfunction than by love. Resentful matriarch Beatrice (Melinda McCrary) copes with her personal failures by dashing her daughters’ hopes, keeping them home from school to work around the house and threatening to destroy whatever they love.

The younger daughter, Tillie (Zoe London), a soft-spoken loner, takes refuge from her mother in books, studying the structure of the atom and sketching scientific experiments in her journal. Tillie feels a deep connection to nature’s misfits and mutants, and she tends as dutifully to her pet albino rabbit, Peter, as she does to a box of marigold plants that she has exposed to radioactive cobalt-60 for a science project. Her older sister, Ruth (Daria LeGrand), is a mutant in her own right, prone to hairpin turns of temper and seizures that suggest she might have epilepsy.

Marigolds is an undeniable showcase for whoever plays Beatrice, and veteran actor Melinda McCrary anchors this production as the belligerent, sometimes sadistic woman. Her embittered speeches, acts of sabotage and ferocious tyranny add up to a monster, but McCrary offers a quieter, more complex take on the character than is often seen. Her Beatrice is clawing at the dignity she sees receding from view. McCrary lets the mother’s dry wit shine through, too, though we’re often too disturbed to laugh.

Joicie Appell brings exceptional nuance to the Hunsdorfers’ silent boarder, Nanny, conveying much with a dark look or a rare smile. Daria LeGrand’s energy seemed unfocused at times in Act 1 during the performance I saw, but she found a groove. Her Ruth grows into a complicated ally for her younger sister as the action unfolds. Zoe London is well cast as Tillie, with a wide-eyed innocence that never seems contrived. And Hannah Freeman makes a memorable impression in a short appearance as Janice Vickery, a budding scientist who gets a little too excited about scraping the gristle off a cat skeleton.

KCAT’s production is technically striking, led by Jeffrey Cady’s exquisite projections. Whether Cosmos-style atomic explorations or etchings of Tillie’s science-fair plans, each seems to capture perfectly the mood of the scene, an effect made even more poignant by Eryn M. Bates’ delicate piano accompaniments.

The scrubby set, designed by Matt Mott, makes much of the Living Room’s narrow downstairs space, and is rich with details: newspapered windows, lampshades askew, piles of rabbit droppings lurking in dim corners. Regina Weller’s props are no less creative and specific. Talcum-powdered linens suggest years of dust spinning through the air; the effect dazzles enough to justify the lingering shower-fresh scent. And Kate Mott’s costumes, especially for Tillie, subtly evoke both the mutant marigolds and the Hunsdorfers’ hard times: shabby clothes, neatly pressed, are adorned with mutations such as oversized bows and molting feathers.

Director Kyle Hatley gives Marigolds an uncharacteristically subdued treatment, and the production is both unhurried and engaging as a result. Silent stage business holds our attention as sharply as the seething verbal battles.

That relaxed pace doesn’t always translate to ideal dramatic timing, and the play’s multiple phone calls can drag, despite McCrary’s skill. (Waiting for the other side of phone conversations has always seemed to me an area in which verisimilitude could — and, in most cases, should — be sacrificed.) But it’s rare to see a script given this kind of respect and breathing room, and the restraint sets up an emotional wallop.

Marigolds has its share of mutants and monsters, but some mutations, Tillie reminds us, are advantageous. “The day will come,” she tells her audience at the science fair, “when mankind will thank God for the strange and beautiful energy from the atom.” And, one hopes, for KCAT’s strange and beautiful production.