Karen Zacarías: Plays One: Native Gardens; The Book Club Play; Destiny of Desire

by Karen Zacarías

The first collection of plays from the critically acclaimed Karen Zacarías, one of the ten most produced playwrights in the USA.

Contains the plays Native Gardens / The Book Club Play / Destiny of Desire



The Book Club Play

A hit comedy about books and the people who love them. When the members of a devoted book club become the subjects of a documentary filmmaker and accept a provocative new member, their long-standing group dynamics take a hilarious turn. Sprinkled with wit, joy and novels galore.

Destiny of Desire

On a stormy night in Bellarica, Mexico, two baby girls are born - one into a life of privilege and one into a life of poverty. When the newborns are swapped by a former beauty queen with an insatiable lust for power the stage is set for two outrageous misfortunes to grow into one remarkable destiny. Karen Zacarías infuses the Mexican telenovela genre with music, high drama and burning passion to make for a fast-paced modern comedy.

Native Gardens

You can't choose your neighbors. In this brilliant new comedy, cultures and gardens clash, turning well-intentioned neighbors into feuding enemies. Pablo, a rising attorney, and doctoral candidate Tania, his very pregnant wife, have just purchased a home next to Frank and Virginia, a well-established D.C. couple with a prize-worthy English garden. But an impending barbeque for Pablo's colleagues and a delicate disagreement over a long-standing fence line soon spirals into an all-out border dispute, exposing both couples' notions of race, taste, class and privilege.

Genres: Plays

312 pages, Paperback

Published June 30, 2019

Reviews

[Charlie Lee]

Difficult to rate this one. Overall, 4.5 stars perhaps? What you can see in this collection is an incredibly talented playwright who likes to toy with genre (The Destiny of Desire) and makes surprisingly funny dramas out of potentially boring situations (The Book Club Play, Native Garden). Her style is not subtle, but it works. They are all well-plotted and structurally sound. I would certainly go watch The Book Club Play or Native Garden live.

The Book Club Play analyses the role of literature to different people and the transformative role it can play in their lives. The neighbours' escalating squabbles in Native Garden over their disputed boundary, politics, and plant choices are particularly funny. The Destiny of Desire satirises the tellenovella genre (essentially melodrama with farcical plot twists) and adds Brechtian stage techniques and a snowballing cumulative chaos that is surprisingly reminiscent of Shakespearean comedy about confused identities. However, I simply didn't enjoy it... Satire can be good, but the genre its satirising I don't enjoy. In my humble opinion, imitation isn't the sincerest form of flattery, it's satire.

[Eli Campbell]

These plays were very fun. I love that they centered Latinx characters and explored the minutia of colonialism/racism. They answer too many questions to be truly thought-provoking, wrapping everything up neatly. Native Gardens was the most interesting, I think.

[ave]

only read destiny of desire
i enjoyed reading it, it did just lose me a bit with the statistics. i got where it was going with it fr, i just was like...? woah