Pettiness, privilege take root in ‘Native Gardens’
It must be hard to write jokes about race with millennials in mind.
This latest generation of adult thinkers, the stereotype goes, doesn’t care much for making fun of minorities. The need to “laugh down,” which was especially prevalent in the stand-up comedy world in the 1990s, has been replaced with a desire to “protest up” — to empower, through culturally sensitive conversation, those people who we consider historically marginalized.
Which is to say that “Native Gardens,” Karen Zacarías’ play about racial, generational and class difference at Main Street Theater through June 10, is a difficult feat to pull off. Written in some ways from the point of view of a young Latino couple, it wants more than anything to be funny while asking the audience to confront their own privileges. But it runs into the problem many works tend to have when they aspire to both educate and entertain — its political and artistic needs begin fighting with each other.
Though “Native Gardens” can be considered a comedy about racial privilege, none of its humor comes from the conversation about race. It wants to be two plays at once, though the trenchant play about privilege and the irreverent play about pregnant women cursing in Spanish end up feeling more mutually exclusive than intended.
The story centers on two neighboring couples, one younger and Latino and the other older and white, who fight over where to build a fence that designates their property lines. The fence is a metaphor for the way privilege is often inherited and therefore never questioned. Because the white family, the Butleys, has owned a bigger yard the whole time, it seems strange to them that the Latino family would want an equally big yard, even if it was a mistake all along — that’s not the way it’s been, so why question it, the Butleys think.
To watch “Native Gardens” is to witness Zacarías feel her way through the problem with joking about inequality, then decide to place the comedy in all things nonpolitical. The play’s humor derives from the idea that the two couples are the same. Both families are petty, rivalrous, territorial, snobbish social climbers with big judgments and bigger egos. When they fight, we laugh because it’s all very silly, but what is silly is the characters and how they act, and not the world that Zacarías wants to critique.
You could say the play is most closely aligned with Tania Del Valle (Briana J. Resa), a secondgeneration MexicanAmerican newlywed working on her Ph.D in anthropology. She considers herself more American than anything else, even though the rest of the country insists on telling her that she’s alien, that she doesn’t belong.
For her, everything can be a symbol of privilege, so she views her neighbors’ immaculate, quietly ostentatious garden of hydrangeas and tulips as a metaphor for, well, it could be colonialism, xenophobia, the wage gap, the glass ceiling or simply a resentment of Tania’s that’s more personal than she would ever admit.
Tania’s story could have been touching. There’s rich history of plays using property to illustrate broader conversations about territory. August Wilson’s “Fences” and Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes’ “In the Heights” are just some of the stories about men and women who own homes, restaurants or shops that are more about the ownership of identity than of physical space. Tania’s fight didn’t need to be petty. If only. There comes a point in “Native Gardens” when it’s no longer interested in exploring inequity, nor what its titular gardens mean beyond just a symbol for immigrant struggle. Tania, we see, seems to actually care about the garden more than anything else, and that realization can be complicated for an audience that wants to side with her.
So Tania and her well-meaning but racially insensitive white neighbors begin to blend into one another. They are both entitled people who want what they think they deserve. Mrs. Butley (Anne Quackenbush), the former defense contractor living next door, tells Tania that she knows “the struggle” of being a woman while ignoring the fact that, earlier, she implied Tania wasn’t an American simply because she was Latino. But it’s impossible to tell if that moment is a critique of Mrs. Butley and her white feminism, or of Tania and her millennial activism, because both have been acting equally impetuous.
Even if “Native Gardens” started off suggesting that “people are different,” or at least their circumstances are, it ends up telling us “people are the same,” at least when it comes to their flaws, egos and personalities.
By the end, it has no thesis at all, other than the uniting power of motherhood. The two households become indistinguishable from another. A “we’re all human (or at least parents) after all” reconciliation has upended the notion that no, of course the Butleys didn’t deserve a bigger garden.
Why did they have that oversize yard in the first place? Zacarías cares about the answer and has, to her credit, written a light and entertaining comedy of errors that acknowledges various points of view. It’s refreshing, after all, to see a domestic comedy that puts people of color in the center for once. But when it comes to the issues, the play skims along the surface. If only it made us laugh not at the petty feuds of neighbors, but rather the complicated truth of the world.