Even with the stamp of approval of the Pulitzer Prize and the name recognition that comes with a film version that starred Joanne Woodward, Paul Zindel’s stage play The Effect of Gamma Rays in Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds is rarely revived.

It is a fragile tale of a young girl’s survival despite a bitter, abusive mother, a play that could easily be derailed in lesser hands, but you would never suspect that from viewing the assured production at Palm Beach Dramaworks.

Although Zindel gave alcoholic divorcee Beatrice Hunsdorfer two teenage daughters, he concedes that the story is rooted in autobiography. He is surely the model for bookish, introverted Tillie, who gains a modicum of recognition and self-confidence from her school science fair project, which lends the play its title.

Tillie is taunted by her sour mother and mocked by her older sister, Ruth, an undisciplined brat with a history of stays in psychiatric hospital and seizures. Tillie’s only affection comes from a pet rabbit, an animal her mother despises. Still, as the play’s title metaphor suggests, Tillie may be the positive mutation, who blossoms despite being exposed to the toxic atmosphere of her family life.

Making her professional debut as Tillie is Arielle Hoffman, a high school senior with a promising future as an actress. The play allows her little opportunity to express her inner turmoil, but she manages to do so wordlessly. And late in the evening, as she confronts her fears and addresses a school assembly about her science project, we begin to see glimmers of Tillie’s inner strength.

Hoffman is overshadowed by Laura Turnbull -- who happens to be her real-life mother -- devouring the role of volatile Beatrice. She is despicable to be sure, yet without softening any of that, Turnbull lets us see the humanity underneath her armor. Credit director William Hayes with deftly orchestrating his cast, including Skye Coyne as Ruth and a frail-looking Harriet Oser as Nanny, an aged boarder to whom Beatrice rents out a room to and belittles.

Virtually another character is the stunning, if drab, two-level living quarters designed by Michael Amico, further evidence that he has mastered Dramaworks’ new space at the Don & Ann Brown Theatre.

Soon after his success with Gamma Rays, playwright Zindel stopped writing for the stage in favor of a career in young adult fiction. The Pulitzer may have been excessive praise, but this drama certainly ranks high in the crowded field of dysfunctional family plays.

THE EFFECT OF GAMMA RAYS ON MAN-IN-THE-MOON MARIGOLDS, Palm Beach Dramaworks at the Don & Ann Brown Theatre, 201 Clematis St., West Palm Beach. Through Sunday, Jan. 29. Tickets: $55. Call: (561) 514-4042.

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As its title, even in its expurgated form, suggests, Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherf**ker With the Hat is no exercise in genteel verbal intercourse. But if you have been waiting for a successor to frequently profane and occasionally profound David Mamet, the high-octane production at GableStage is a terrific opportunity to jump onto the Guirgis train.

The Tony Award-nominated comedy gained its initial attention last season on Broadway for its unprintable title. Yet once you get beyond that -- and few followers of GableStage are likely to find the blithely scatological language much of an impediment -- you will discover an engrossing play of five lost souls in search of truth, love and honor.

Of course, those are commodities in short supply in Guirgis’s world, but the fun is in their pursuit and the reflex treacheries that make them so unattainable.

The Motherf**ker begins with incurably romantic ex-con Jackie (Arturo Fernandez), recently released after doing time for drug dealing, arriving home to his cocaine-addicted girl friend Veronica (Gladys Ramirez) with flowers and candy in hand.

But his ardor turns to rage when he notices a strange hat in their bedroom and other evidence of the stranger having been in their bed. So packing a pistol, Jackie storms out in search of the now hatless motherf**ker, an odyssey that will involve his substance abuse sponsor Ralph D (Ethan Henry), Ralph’s horny, neglected wife Victoria (Betsy Graver), and Jackie’s effeminate cousin Julio (Alex Alvarez), who is eager to unleash his Jean-Claude Van Damme side for Jackie’s sake.

Director Joseph Adler has a way of coming up with the right actors for casting challenges, as he demonstrates again here. All five are top-notch, forming a forceful ensemble that navigates through the hairpin turns of Guirgis’s explosive dialogue. The standout of the company is Fernandez, whose quirky delivery of lines keeps raising the comic bar.

Profanity aside, Guirgis has his characters spout verbal torrents of surprising lyricism, though occasionally with word choices beyond their education level. The Motherf**ker seems to add up to more than it does, but the journey is awfully entertaining anyway.

THE MOTHERF**KER WITH THE HAT, GableStage at the Biltmore Hotel, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables. Continuing through Feb. 5. Tickets: $35-$50. Call: (305) 445-1119.

Arielle Hoffman always knew that she wanted to be an actress. After all, theater is the family business.

The 17-year-old daughter of South Florida fixtures Laura Turnbull and Avi Hoffman grew up thinking the odd hours, feast-or-famine, histrionic life of stage performers was normal. “I didn’t know that this was unusual or weird,” she shrugs. “I just had no idea that people had regular jobs.”

This weekend, the Hoffman family’s elder daughter, a high school senior, has a rite of passage. She will make her professional stage debut at Palm Beach Dramaworks, playing opposite her mother in Paul Zindel’s Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.

Appropriately, they play mother and daughter, but that is where the similarity ends. Turnbull plays embittered, alcoholic divorcee Beatrice Hunsdorfer, who takes her disappointments with life out on her daughters, Ruth and Tillie. Hoffman plays introverted Tillie, who reacts to the verbal and emotional abuse by crawling into her protective shell.

In real life, the two actresses have a great relationship. “Characters like her have so many issues and have so much underlying who-knows-what. It’s just more challenging, to play someone that I truly am not like,” says Turnbull. “Because she’s just such a horrible human being, (she) is more fun to play than the people who are nice, the Donna Reed, everything-is-wonderful types. For me, it’s a challenge to not be the kind of mom I am. I love my kids. I am so proud of them.”

For vivacious, gregarious Hoffman, it is a relief to play characters unlike themselves. “I think it would be really hard if it were closer to how it was in real life. If, in reality, we had a relationship that wasn’t good, if we didn’t get along. She calls me ‘ugly’ several times in the play. If that’s how I knew she felt in real life, I couldn’t do it night after night.”

First produced in 1964, but revived infrequently, Gamma Rays is exactly the sort of play Palm Beach Dramaworks relishes. Turnbull has never seen it performed but has been aware of the script since her high school days.

“As kids, we knew some of the monologues and we’d do them in auditions,’ she recalls. “The last time I read it I was younger and I didn’t have kids, so I see it now from a whole different perspective. Looking at it now as an actor, I couldn’t wait to get my teeth into it, to mine everything that’s there.”

Hoffman was unfamiliar with the play, but she seems undaunted by it. Asked what she feels is the biggest challenge for her, she mentions the other demands on her time. “There is the challenge of working this into my life as a high school student,” she replies. “This is what I want to spend my time doing, but unfortunately I have college applications and homework that I have to get done.”

Gamma Rays is a textbook dysfunctional family play, but with an eventual upbeat message. “That although life deals you what it deals you, and everyone handles certain situations in their own way, there is the possibility of coming out from underneath it all,” says Turnbull. “That hope can remain somewhere out there. Not for my character necessarily, not for my other daughter necessarily, but for Tillie.”

“I think the meaning is pretty easily described by the metaphor, that the plants closest to the radiation die,” adds Hoffman. “And the ones on the outside that got the littlest radiation had the most beautiful mutation and grew to be tall and gorgeous. Tillie is the positive mutation. Although she is in the same situation as her mom and her sister, she is coming out of it because of how she thinks about the world. She will be OK.”

THE EFFECT OF GAMMA RAYS ON MAN-IN-THE-MOON MARIGOLDS, Palm Beach Dramaworks at the Don & Ann Brown Theatre, 201 Clematis St., West Palm Beach. Opening today and running through Sunday, Jan. 29. Tickets: $55. Call: (561) 514-4042.

As year-end traditions go, the awarding of the “dubious achievement” Hapsters for theatrical highs and lows can be traced back to 1994. So take a stroll down this year’s memory lane with us and remember, the decision of the judges -- OK, me -- is final.

Best Pulitzer Prognostication: Anyone can produce a play that has already won the Pulitzer Prize. Palm Beach Dramaworks does it all the time. The real skill is in selecting a script before it earns the prize. The Caldwell Theatre pulled off that nifty trick, mounting a top-notch production of Bruce Norris’s politically incorrect Clybourne Park in January, three months before it copped a Pulitzer.

Best Shameless Box Office Grab: Early in the year, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre discovered the commercial value of casting kids from the community in its production of The Sound of Music, assuring ticket sales from the tots’ families and neighbors. At the end of 2011, the theater doubled down on the idea, signing up 240 local youngsters to appear in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, in alternating teams of 30. One wonders what is next. A permanent rotation of Oliver! and Annie?

Best Reason to See Red: Early in the year, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre was crowing about a perceived coup, having snagged the performance rights to John Logan’s Tony Award-winning play Red, with the promise that it would be the Florida premiere. But no one told Coral Gables’s GableStage, which also put the play in its season in November, three months before the planned Maltz production. Oh, well: the Maltz can still brag about having the Palm Beach County premiere of Red.

Worst Theater News of 2012: Nominated several times for the regional Tony Award, Florida Stage grew to become (as it loved to state) “the nation’s largest professional theatre producing exclusively new American work” in its 24 years of operation. Addressing his theatergoers in announcing his new season, producing director Lou Tyrrell said in a press release, “This year, for our twenty-fifth, I think they might expect a few extra little surprises along the way.”

Indeed. In June, just before the scheduled opening of its summer show, Ella, Florida Stage abruptly announced it was closing permanently and filing for bankruptcy, leaving a giant hole in the area’s theater community. The cause? Audience rebellion and attrition from the company’s first season at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach.

The Best Theater News of 2012: Tiny (an adjective producing artistic director Bill Hayes hates to hear when describing his company) Palm Beach Dramaworks moved into new larger, better-equipped, more comfortable digs, trading up from 84 seats to 218 at the new Don and Ann Brown Theatre (the former Cuillo Centre for the Arts). If you are unsure of the theater’s location in downtown West Palm Beach, look for World of Beer and it is across the street to the west.

A year earlier, Dramaworks announced it would open on 11-11-11, a risky declaration with any major construction project, and darned if it didn’t open on time and on budget. It is the kind of well-planned, prudent renovation that makes coming up with punch lines very difficult.

The “So Nice To Have You Back Where You Belong” Award: No, not Dolly Gallagher Levi, but Michael Hall, who came out of retirement to return to the Caldwell Theatre, where he was the founding artistic director, to stage its production of Next Fall. And according to Hall, he is in search of a good script to direct there again.

The “So Nice To Have You Back Where You Belong” Award, No. 2: To Nancy Barnett, for her return to the stage in the Caldwell Theatre’s After the Revolution. She had given up acting to join the staff of Florida Stage, eventually becoming the company’s managing director. And considering how that ended, it is fair to assume she is a better actress than administrator.

The “So Nice To Have You Back Where You Belong” Award, No. 3: Jan McArt, lately a professor and producer or theater at Lynn University in Boca Raton, could not pass up the opportunity to get back onstage in a staged reading of Murder on Gin Lane by Carbonell judge Tony Finstrom. The fact that she loaned them the use of the Wold Performing Arts Center stage may have something to do with the casting, but it was refreshing to see her back in action.

The “I Want To Be A Producer” Award: Three guys from Boca Raton, all in their 20s -- Philip Morgaman, Frankie J. Grande and Brian Kapetanis -- became real-life Max Bialystocks, producing the $3 million Broadway revival of Born Yesterday, which garnered two Tony Award nominations. True, they lost all of their investors’ money, but they had a great time and they will probably be back producing another show soon.

Worst-Kept Pseudonymous Secret: In Florida Stage’s fifth annual 1st Stage Festival of New Works, a biography of Edgar Allen Poe, called Poet (get it?) by Kew Henry, was among the scripts read. The author turned out to be Kathleen Holmes (same initials, get it?), wife of founding producing director, Lou Tyrrell. There is no truth to the rumor that the play caused the demise of Florida Stage, but it might have been a small contributing factor.

Best Onstage Projectile Vomiting: Kim Ostrenko, for tossing her cookies eight times a week with unnerving authenticity in Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage at the Caldwell.

Worst Performance by a Seven-Time Emmy Award Winner: To Ed Asner, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the Dust Bowl-dry history lesson FDR, which managed to include every wrong note of one-person shows, plus a wobbly-accented, fumbling impersonation of the 32^nd president. Fortunately, the Caldwell Theatre made a little profit on the booking, which ran a too-long, one-week’s time.

Best (as in Longest) Delayed Opening of a Theater Company: Despite its generally known money woes, the Caldwell Theatre startled the theater community by announcing the creation of a second stage program in Boca’s Mizner Park. This so-called Caldwell 2 was to have opened in early September with Anne Nelson’s The Guys, a mournful tale commemorating 9/11. But shortly before the launch, the production was scrapped, with the dubious claim that audiences would not be interested in the subject after the 10^th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks.

So the opening of Caldwell 2 was deferred to December, with a more upbeat selection of the comic Reindeer Monologues. That too was scrubbed, with artistic director Clive Cholerton citing insufficient box office revenues for its mainstage show, After the Revolution. The Caldwell 2 has two more time slots in 2012, but the Vegas odds are rising that the series ever happens.

Best Glasses-Steaming Debut: Palm Beach State College coed Georgina Castens made her professional stage debut in Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll as the nightie-garbed Southern nymphet title character in the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival’s production. Artistic director Kermit Christman knew he had the right play when he read that the 1956 movie version had been condemned by the powerful Catholic League of Decency, and that Time Magazine called it the “dirtiest American-made motion picture that had ever been legally exhibited.”

Castens made a promising debut, but her production photos -- still floating around the Internet -- are sensational.

Most Optimistic New Company Line-Up in a Miserable Economy: Despite the continuing sluggish economy, Palm Beach County is brimming with new theater companies, or at least announced new companies hoping to open in 2012.

There is Kim St. Leon’s Parade Productions, with definite dates in late January-early February for Brooklyn Boy by Donald Margulies at the Mizner Park Cultural Center. There is The Theatre at Arts Garage in Delray Beach, the troupe headed by Lou Tyrrell emerging from the ashes of Florida Stage with March-April dates for a new Woody Guthrie revue.

Independent producer Alan Jacobson has announced plans to lease Florida Stage’s former space in Manalapan, launching Plaza Theatre in February with a one-woman revue starring Donna McKechnie. And last, and probably least, Gary Waldman and Jamison Troutman, producers of several failed theater ventures locally, are returning to the area to found the Boynton Beach Theater Company. The best it can muster for a premiere is the “long-awaited” revival of Snow Birds, a lightweight revue aimed at the condo crowd, beginning Feb. 1.

Happy New Year, everyone!

It was a precarious year in theater in South Florida, with the sudden devastating demise of West Palm Beach’s Florida Stage, not quite offset by the expanded potential for Palm Beach Dramaworks in its new, larger space.

Zoetic Stage debuted in Miami with its impressive repertory company of area actors, while announced, but not yet open, are Parade Productions in Boca Raton and The Theater at Arts Garage in Delray Beach, presumably poised to shore up the battered theater landscape. Also still to come is Caldwell 2, a second stage offshoot of the Boca company, though two announced attempts to open in the new Mizner Park Cultural Center both were scrubbed for lack of time and resources.

Still, despite the challenges of the economy, there was plenty of impressive theater locally in 2011. Here are my highly subjective picks for 10 standouts.

1. All My Sons (Palm Beach Dramaworks) -- An early Arthur Miller family tragedy, expertly performed and visually striking on the company’s new stage, thanks to scenic wizard Michael Amico and director J. Barry Lewis.

2. Crazy for You (Maltz Jupiter Theatre) -- A tap-happy musical extravaganza built from recycled Gershwin songs, with giddy choreography by Shea Sullivan and a standout lead performance by Matt Loehr.

3. August: Osage County (Actors’ Playhouse) -- Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning dysfunctional family dark comedy, with a large ensemble cast of many of the area’s best actors. The company depends on musicals, but saves its creativity for plays.

4. Kiss of the Spider Woman (Slow Burn Theatre Company) -- An unlikely musical adaptation of Manuel Puig’s odd couple political drama, another ambitious achievement for this fledgling troupe, with a star-making turn by Renata Eastlick in the title role.

5. Ghost-Writer (Florida Stage) -- An ode to inspiration by Michael Hollinger as seen from the perspective of an uber-efficient secretary who continues to receive dictation from her author-boss after he passes away. A succinct example of why we will miss this company.

6. Clybourne Park (Caldwell Theatre Company) -- Artistic director Clive Cholerton challenged his audience with this politically incorrect sequel to A Raisin in the Sun, a look at racial matters in America over a 50-year span. Soon after this well-cast comedy opened here, playwright Bruce Norris copped a Pulitzer for it.

7. The Brothers Size (GableStage) -- Miami-raised Tarell Alvin McCraney finally got his area professional debut, directing his own stylized theater piece, a ritual tale of two brothers, one a hard-working garage owner, the other a felon recently released from prison. A potent blend of dance, song and words.

8. The Sound of Music (Maltz Jupiter Theatre) -- The tale of spunky young nun Maria Rainer, the final collaboration of Rodgers and Hammerstein has been encrusted with sugar over time, but you would never know that from Marc Robin’s production or the lead performance by radiant Catherine Walker.

9. West Side Story (Kravis Center) -- The landmark Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim musical that transplanted Romeo and Juliet to the mean streets of New York remains a vibrant modern classic and, here, a textbook example of what a national tour should be.

10. Beauty Queen of Leenane (Palm Beach Dramaworks) -- Martin McDonagh’s mother-daughter battle of wills in a dreary Irish village proved mordantly comic in the very capable hands of Barbara Bradshaw and Kati Brazda.

The name Andrew Lloyd Webber does not bring to mind light comic romps as much as it does overblown musicals with operatic pretensions.

But back in 1968, as an exercise for a prep school, he and lyricist Tim Rice devised a frothy entertainment from an Old Testament yarn, built of tongue-in-cheek songs in anachronistic pop styles.

The show is Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and it did eventually get inflated with spectacle and star power on Broadway. But the Maltz Jupiter Theatre gets the scale just right -- a bit of glitz and flash, offset by winking, puckish charm.

Much of the credit for achieving that balancing act goes to director-choreographer Mark Martino, tapped by artistic director Andrew Kato for the assignment.

“Yeah, he told me he felt like my history here demonstrates that my particular wheelhouse -- what I love to do -- is to take a large show, with a lot of production value, a lot of sets and a lot of costumes -- like ‘La Cage aux Folles’ or ‘Crazy for You,’ you know? -- and dive inside of it and find where its heart lives,” says Martino.

He was familiar with the show, having appeared in it during his days as a performer, some 15 or so years ago. “For me, the joy of it is finding the fun of the show. It’s written for children and we are encouraged to tell the story in the most amusing, delightful, colorful way you can. At the same time, you deliver a very honest sentiment, I hope.”

Having succeeded with The Sound of Music and its von Trapp brood of youngsters last year, Kato made the inclusion of kids from the community -- more than 240, in rotating teams of 30 each night -- part of the mandate for Joseph.

“I will tell you I was taken aback, like ‘Oh, my Lord, what do I do?’ But what looked to me at first like a logistical nightmare, actually turned out to inform every element of the show for me,” explains Martino. “So I said to my set designer Dan Kuchar, we need something that A) reflects that reality, that we have many, many, many children involved in this show, and B) provides me a place where they can be a part of the action without taking it over.”

Kuchar sets the show, at least initially, in a contemporary American elementary school, where the Narrator (Jodie Langel) is a teacher who introduces her young charges to the story of dream interpreter Joseph and his envious 11 brothers. A kids’ chorus is employed -- either to increase the charm quotient or to sell more tickets to their families and neighbors -- but Martino was able to keep the pint-sized rabble contained, relegating them to upstage choir pews, often out of sight behind a scrim. W.C. Fields would understand and approve.

The story is conveyed entirely through song, in a giddy series of stylistic knockoffs. Like a tongue-in-cheek country-western ballad, a faux-melancholy French chanson, a carefree calypso ditty and a vintage rock-and-roll song for the hip-swiveling pharoah. Clearly the young Lloyd Webber never met a musical parody he didn’t like.

Then Martino extends the fun, following up many of the songs with an explosion of dance. “The show asks you to dance in a variety of styles,” he notes. “And we made a conscious decision to hire extremely good dancers. So we have our sort of faux-Fosse noir number, a cowboy hoedown, a ‘60s number, all those things are built into the show.”

And he has strong singing voices, like Langel, who is again impressive following her Maltz debut in 2009 in the title role of Evita. As Joseph, John Pinto Jr. has a wide-eyed innocent look and plenty of lung power, as he demonstrates on his big plaintive ballad, Close Every Door. Ryan Williams earns laughs as the regal, rockabilly pharoah and the ensemble of Joseph’s siblings handles its musical numbers capably, taking turns in the lead vocal spotlight.

The production design is all first-class, particularly Jose M. Rivera’s parade of breakaway costumes, which emphasizes the Las Vegas side of the Bible. Also contributing to the show’s flash is Paul Black’s rock concert lighting. Both designers get to show off one final time in the post-curtain call “mega mix,” a reprise of the score on fast-forward, very reminiscent of Mamma Mia!

JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR DREAMCOAT, Maltz Jupiter Theatre, 1001 E. Indiantown Road, Jupiter. Through Sunday, Dec. 18. Tickets: $43-$60. Call: (561) 575-2223.