Four people, possessing the best intentions, discover their worst qualities in Karen Zacarías' popular comedy Native Gardens, a story of next-door neighbors in bitter disagreement. The Dorset Theatre Festival production is light summer entertainment featuring actors who make the laugh lines sparkle. Humor sugarcoats the tricky subject of cultural differences, and the play skates above any deep political meaning while using a backyard fence to express the silly side of taking sides.
Staunch Republicans Frank and Virginia Butley live in a posh neighborhood in Washington, D.C., and are soon to retire from prestigious jobs: his in government, hers a trailblazing career as an engineer for a defense contractor. Retirement will give Frank even more time for the European-style garden that he meticulously tends and enters in the local horticultural society competition. He's dead set on winning a blue ribbon after many soul-crushing years of honorable mentions.
The house next door has been neglected for years when the Del Valles, an energetic young couple, move in with plans to fix it up. Pablo is climbing the corporate ladder at a heavyweight law firm, and Tania is defending her doctoral dissertation while in the final weeks of her first pregnancy. They're progressive Democrats, checking the opposite of every demographic box from the Butleys. Still, both families wave kindly to each other across the fence, hoping to get along.
The Butleys invite the Del Valles over, and if everyone's smiles are strained, their manners are perfect. Tania wants to plant a native garden in her new backyard featuring only indigenous flora. No pesticides for her, while Frank relies on them to coax out his best blossoms. Still, peace seems possible until the cultural differences mount up. Zacarías comically demonstrates how prejudice boils down to defining people with clichés.
Pablo is not the disadvantaged Mexican that Frank and Virginia mistake him for. He comes from a wealthy Chilean family and, as we'll see, has no trouble demanding what he feels entitled to. Frank isn't a heartless GOP ideologue — he considered voting for Obama — but a man obsessed with fighting off grubs for the glory of his flowers. Tania isn't an immigrant but a PhD candidate born in the U.S. who expects to persuade the Butleys that her gardening style is ecologically and morally superior. Virginia isn't an elderly housewife but a smart, tough engineer who survived decades of being underestimated because she's a woman.
The play has the solid craftsmanship of a situation comedy, and Zacarías sets up a time-based crisis. The garden society will be judging Frank's efforts on Sunday, and the Del Valles will entertain Pablo's coworkers in the backyard on Saturday. Without time for much renovation, the Del Valles propose the fast improvement of tearing down the battered chain-link fence on the property line and replacing it with wood. Frank and Virginia are delighted because they hate the fence, too.
It will be the last thing they all agree on, because the Del Valles consult their mortgage deed and discover that the fence is in the wrong place. Pablo and Tania own two feet of Frank and Virginia's yard — the part with the beautiful flowers on it. There's no solution fair to both sides.
The play premiered in 2016 but was written well before Donald Trump could use the presidency to denigrate immigrants, separate families and make wall-building political. In Native Gardens, the humor makes tough subjects comfortable and bad behavior ludicrous, but it also nudges audiences to see people compassionately. Major polarizing points of race, class, gender and age all become funny when the stereotypes used for strangers don't hold up for the people next door.
The performances are deft, and the actors work well as a comic ensemble. Sally Wingert conveys the hard edge of Virginia's savvy as well as the soft side of her affection for her husband. Tom Aulino's nervous Frank is only at ease in the garden or, when tension rises, manifesting irritation by tossing an acorn back over the fence at the Del Valles' aging oak tree, where it belongs.
Orlando Javier Hernández makes Pablo a smart lawyer with a secret reserve of hotheadedness. He loves his wife but might love winning even more. Maribel Martinez plays Tania with an expansive certainty laced with the giddiness of youth. Outbursts come easily to her, but she calls them signs of her "passionate rationality."
The play's subject is surviving conflict, a hot topic in a polarized America. Because it begins with the neat visual metaphor of a fence between neighbors, Native Gardens seems to promise a neat answer to keeping the peace between people who differ. The audience spends all 90 minutes of the fast-paced play looking at a dividing line that overflows with peonies and hydrangeas. Tender flowers planted by a well-intentioned gardener also happen to be unlawful seizure of property, colonialism in the form of plant life.
With dense details, scenic designer Rodrigo Escalante turns two backyards into characters in their own right. Lighting designer Carolina Ortiz Herrera creates outdoor nights and days, and supports punchy storytelling with bold lighting changes. Sound designer Germán Martínez uses bright Latin music to underscore the fierce drive of each character.
Director Tatyana-Marie Carlo is impressively moderate in making each character sympathetic. Viewers can't take sides because each side is worthy, and fairness itself becomes an elusive goal.
The resolution Zacarías supplies is overly sweet and simple, yet it never hurts to see tolerance embodied. Before tranquility is restored, Zacarías summons a cartoonish confrontation that catapults her earnest characters into zany overreaction. The play represents intolerance with a fence line but renders the consequences as simple foolishness.
Squabbles with neighbors can bring out one's most primal instincts. The characters in Native Gardens become buffoons, but not before they prove that there's nothing people fight harder for than property and cultural identity.