Comedy blooms in ‘Native Gardens.’
Eighty square feet of land.
That’s what the neighbors in Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s delightful production of “Native Gardens” are fighting over.
But the battle in Karen Zacarías’ zesty comedy isn’t just about a bit of earth. Oh no — it’s about the soul of our nation.
In “Native Gardens,” a young and upwardly mobile couple move into a neighborhood of genteel blue bloods. Chilean immigrant Pablo Del Valle and his New Mexico-born wife, Tania, are at first amused by their older and wellmeaning neighbors, Virginia and Frank Butley — the kind of white people who awkwardly assume anyone with a Spanish accent is Mexican.
But what looks to be a friendly relationship is quickly derailed when the Del Valles decide to replace a shared fence — and find out the property line is not where the Butleys thought it was.
As the argument gets more and more heated, the characters’ actions grow increasingly absurd.
Director Cynthia White could just let her actors be silly, but instead she does something quite terrifying: While she makes the performers land their jokes, White also has them keep their characterizations grounded in reality. This makes the show less madcap than it might be — but creates the terrifying notion that when Frank makes a racial faux pas or Tania curses at a bewildered Virginia, we might see ourselves in their actions.
As she showed in her plays “Legacy of Light” and “Destiny of Desire,” Zacarías can deftly raise questions of sexism, classism and racism, all of which are shrewdly addressed here. Yet she’s more obvious than usual in her depiction of the United States as a garden and the cultural turf war over the old ways vs. the new, the privileged vs. those who struggle for their achievements.
The actors almost make you overlook the repetition in the writing. Kate Ingram and Aléa Figueroa share a delicious confrontation. Fredy Ruiz expertly balances charm and frustration. And Michael Edwards, as Frank, adds a poignant component to the humor as a man who can’t quite keep up with a changing world.
There really aren’t any villains stomping around the garden on Bert Scott’s fun and functional set.
“They are decent people, aren’t they?” Pablo asks of his neighbors. And you know what? They are, just as we all hope to be. But “Native Gardens” cleverly and comically shows how much easier it is to forget decency than to open our minds.