[2] In December 2008 and January 2009, Suffolk University and Boston Playwrights' Theatre produced Zinn's updated version of Daughter of Venus.
[3] A Boston Globe reviewer panned the new version for "dilut[ing] the story's specificity without making it feel current," but conceded that "the play's central concerns — personal and social ethics; the balance of obligations to ourselves, our families, and our fellow citizens; the uses and abuses of political and scientific power — remain as timely as ever.
In doing so, it made a hash of logic and chronology and also diluted the specificity of the play’s immediate concerns — the nuclear arms race and the citizens’ movement protesting it — without really strengthening its deeper theme, the complicated relationship between personal and political acts.
Now, though, Zinn the younger has restored the original script (while maintaining a few of the edits that, he says, smoothed the action), and it's remarkable how much better “Daughter of Venus’’ works in this form.
In Jeff Zinn’s fluid, naturalistic staging at WHAT (on an evocatively academic-homey set by Ji-Youn Chang), the play comes across as a quick-witted and emotionally complex study of a family, and a world, in crisis."