Paul zindel born

Paul Zindel, who drew on memories of his troubled childhood on Staten Island for a prize-winning play with a tongue-twisting title, ''The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds,'' died on Thursday at the Jacob Perlow Hospice at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan.

He was 66.

The cause was cancer, said his daughter, Lizabeth Zindel.

Mr. Zindel had been a high school chemistry teacher for six years, demonstrating basic chemical reactions and explaining concepts like atomic numbers and covalent bonds, when ''The Effect of Gamma Rays'' opened in Houston.

As with other plays that were staged before he quit teaching in 1969, he had written it in his spare time and seemed to relish his outsider status -- he never went to the theater, he said, until he was already a published playwright.

''The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds''