THEATRE REVIEW: BY KELLY KERWIN
Dorset, VT– Saturday, July 13, 2024

It’s said that “good fences make good neighbors.” In Native Gardens, Dorset Theatre Festival’s latest production, they don’t.

The play opens with two coupled neighbors who share a property line. The Butleys are waspy, Republican Boomers who have lived there for years. The other two are brand new to the neighborhood; they are a younger progressive Latine couple: the Del Valles. The Butley’s pristine white house compliments their treasured floral garden of hydrangeas and azaleas. The Del Valles’s backyard is still littered with dead leaves from a controversial tree, but they have dreams of filling it with indigenous wildlife to attract insects and bees.

Frank Butler (Tom Aulino)—the affluent retiree—is fixated on finally winning the Potomac Horticulture Society Best Garden award. Pablo Del Valles (Orlando Javiar Hernández) feels pressure at his law firm and gets talked into hosting the entire staff at his yet-to-be-fixed-up home. The Del Valles decide to throw the networking party in the one area they can tackle in time: the backyard. If only the Butleys would let the Del Valles replace the unsightly chain-link fence dividing the two yards. As it turns out, the Butleys had nothing to do with the erection of said fence and also want it gone! Win/win! The couples agree to swap out the fence for an attractive wooden fence built just in time for Frank’s gardening competition. This deal is the last.

In the process of fence-changing, the Del Valles discover Frank’s garden is a good two feet past the official property line. The hydrangeas have gone too far! Thus the playwright, Karen Zacarías, plants the seeds for bedlam: a land dispute amid cultural and philosophical differences. Frank and his wife Virginia (the brilliant Sally Wingert) show their white privilege by inadvertently dropping micro-aggressions and asking racially insensitive questions. Pablo and Tania (Maribel Martinez), while more in-tune with the world, allow their anger to manifest with ageist accusations and some snappy Spanish name-calling. Cue the tit-for-tat, he-said-she-said, Spy versus Spy style thirst for justice and revenge.

There’s not a lot in common between the Butleys and the Del Valles, so it’s no surprise these couples wind up in dialectical opposition. What is unexpected are the moments where they find common ground. Tatyana-Marie Carlo’s tender direction shines brightest during the many moments where the neighbors try, in earnest, to connect. A particularly touching scene occurs between the two women. Virginia and Tania both come from more humble backgrounds and have had to face the world head-on without a financial cushion. Carlo brings her actors close together and creates an intimate, considerate moment between the two rivals. It almost seems like the women will find a way through the muck until, of course, someone steps in it (Martinez does an excellent job smiling through gritted teeth).

As the neighbors-turned-adversaries find new ways to try and save their own plot of land, Carlo and set designer Rodrigo Escalante illustrate just how quickly a seed of anger can grow into something untenable. Flags are planted, fences are torn asunder, ordinances get posted, dirt gets thrown, and next thing you know there’s a chainsaw. The Butleys and the Del Valles are in their own war of the roses, and neither couple is backing down.

While billed as a comedy—there are plenty of laughs—the heart of the play is not buried within prat falls or twisted paybacks. Rather, the desire, failure, and eventual victory of wildly different people finding harmony is what makes Native Gardens such a prescient and watchable play.

Eventually, the universe intervenes forcing everyone to pause. Once the couples are standing onstage in the final, peaceful tableau, I was unexpectedly moved. What could be read as an overly sentimental ending comes through as a poignant reflection of what our country could be and should be: a place where different people with different belief systems co-exist. Native Gardens shows the possibility of finding unity amid the hysteria, but it takes compromise and compassion—principles I haven’t seen in the headlines in I don’t know how long. Had this play been programmed a mere few years ago, I’m not sure it would have the same emotional punch.

Native Gardens is a well-timed and delightful follow-up to the hilariously gruesome Beauty Queen of Leenane, proving the leaders at Dorset Theatre Festival show no signs of “phoning-one-in.” Next on the docket is a one-woman show about America’s favorite second fiddle: Vivian Vance. Sidekicked is directed by Jackson Gay—reteaming with the stunning Kelly McAndrew who wowed (and frightened) Dorset audiences last summer in Misery. McAndrew is becoming NYC’s go-to new play actor; in the past few months I’ve seen her as a tragic bereaved mother in Page 73’s Stargazers and a hilarious life-coach-for-life-coaches in Clubbed Thumb’s Coach Coach. With McAndrew, Gay, and the Dorset Theatre Festival penchant for the best production values in the state, I won’t be surprised if Sidekicked sets the bar for professional theater in Vermont even higher.