Native Gardens at the Rep is a light-hearted look at borders, race and privilege

Good fences don't necessarily make good neighbors, especially when gardens are involved.

That's the core of Native Gardens by Karen Zacarias, a comedy in which a clash of culture, gardens and property lines turns well-intentioned neighbors into feuding enemies. The fight takes the stage this week at Little Rock's Arkansas Repertory Theatre.

The outlook is rosy, so to speak, when Pablo Del Valle (Gabriel Pena), a rising lawyer, and doctoral candidate Tania Del Valle (Aurora Leonard), his pregnant wife, have bought a house next to Frank and Virginia Butley (Kurt Zischke and Rachel Harker), a Washington couple with a prize-worthy English garden.

But an impending barbecue for Pablo's colleagues and a dispute over a long-standing fence line soon spiral into a border dispute, exposing both couples' notions of race, taste, class and privilege.

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All four principal actors are making their Arkansas Rep debuts.

Harker, who has done three Zacarias' plays, says this is the first year on the repertory/regional theater circuit for the comedy, which is currently one of the nation's most-produced plays.

"It's really relevant for today, but it's also timeless," she says.

"And it's relevant in a really funny way," Zischke adds, noting that the play delves into not just garden soil but issues of race, gender and class. "And without hitting you over the head," Harker says.

"It's a strong [play] from everybody's point of view," Zischke concludes.

Conflict arises first in terms of differing gardening philosophies and practices, the cast members say, and things escalate when they discover that the property line between them isn't exactly where they thought it was.

"He's the gardener," Harker says of Zischke's character, though Zischke admits he himself is no great shakes as a gardener; at home, he says, "I killed all the hydrangeas and azaleas." Isn't that pretty hard to do? "I found a way."

As Harker describes it, the Butleys' plot leans toward a traditional English garden. Tania, however, wants to plant "an organic, native garden."

Leonard sees it pitting a young, presumably liberal, "LatinX" couple against an older white couple whose Republicanism is inferred though not stated outright.

"We don't announce a side, but we do live comfortably in a setting that we've made," Zischke explains.

The actors also note that the playwright doesn't take sides either; they praise her "mischievous sense of humor." The ending, they say, is hopeful and involves a degree of compromise.

"There's no sense of irony, no sense of judgment," Harker says. "It's just this hopeful comedy. It goes to a few dark places but not in a suffocating way.

"Each couple is diverse, but they're wanting the same thing: to be good neighbors. It's funny, but it's real, and we see how circumstances tend to take over when we think we're in control."

There are a handful of subsidiary, nonspeaking roles for gardeners, fence builders and so on, whom the audience will see mostly making set changes. That's built into the script. The four actors praised Mike Nichols' set design — "The colors are amazing," Zischke says — and Holly Payne's costumes, which, he says, "are going to be rather amusing."

Native Gardens is the second production in the Rep's 2019 season, and also the second show since the theater's resurrection after its April 2018 announcement that funding shortfalls were forcing it to suspend operations.

The juxtaposition of a pretty much unknown comedy and the season opener, a highly successful production of the very familiar musical Chicago, was deliberate, says Karen Rudolph, the theater's director of marketing and audience engagement.

"We did focus groups" in assembling the season lineup, she explains, "and they wanted to laugh, to see something light."

The theater has been hoping that audiences seeing the quality of the initial production — "the set, the costumes, the acting," she says — would be better disposed to continue to support the Rep.

Contrast that with a new comedy, a chance, Harker says, "to see something new, fresh, exciting, where you don't know where it's going to go, something brand new that nobody's seen."

"This will surprise you," Zischke adds.

Zischke characterizes it as "a Dick Van Dyke Show for a new millennium," and if you're looking to see where the humor dividing line is, the actors say it's more along the lines of Neil Simon than Edward Albee's sometimes savage Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Leonard sees the play as an opportunity to reach out to members of the Hispanic community, who, she says, don't get enough chances to see themselves onstage.

But mostly, Pena says, "it's a great, relatable play. Enjoy yourself. Enjoy a good laugh, watching a good fight and hearing [the characters say] things you've said yourself, or at least thought."

Style on 04/16/2019