Stage Review - Native Gardens (Woodinville Rep)

Stage Review - Native Gardens
Presented By: Woodinville Repertory Theatre - Woodinville, WA
Show Run: May 01 - May 24, 2026
Date Reviewed: Saturday, May 02, 2026 (Opening Weekend)
Run Time: 2 Hours (including a 20-minute intermission)
Reviewed by: Anna Tatelman

As anyone who’s ever been involved in a property dispute with a neighbor will know, these legal disagreements can be both highly awkward and unpleasant. Throw in tensions over immigration, discrimination, and xenophobia, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. That’s what Woodinville Repertory Theatre does with its current production of Native Gardens. Through a fast-paced, comedic lens, this show explores how property ownership is never as clearcut as the stakes in the ground might suggest – at least not so long as the people on either side of the dividing line remain complex and flawed.

Written by Karen Zacarías, Native Gardens tracks two middleclass suburban couples who live next door to each other. One of the couples – Pablo and Tania Del Valle – are Latinx, expecting their first child and have just bought the house. The other couple – Frank and Virginia Butley – are white, have grown children, and are fixtures in the neighborhood. While in the process of removing a fence between their yards that both couples find ugly, the Del Valles discover that their property line actually extends further than they originally thought – several feet into what the Butleys have used for decades as their garden.

Audiences immediately can sense the complex tensions simmering between these two neighboring homes through the set design, which depicts the exteriors of two houses that are almost – but not quite – identical (set design by Molly West). Beyond their matching facades and doors, the home on the right offers an idyllic porch with chairs plus two colorful and manicured garden beds. The home on the left, by contrast, offers no containment for its people or plants, but instead features tendrils of greenery spilling along its walls and grounds.

While the set design does feel similar to the previous show I reviewed at Woodinville Rep (Perfect Arrangement), it nonetheless does a smart job of revealing the fundamentally differing philosophies of these two households about beauty, nature, and how people should occupy or coexist with their land. While Frank keeps a perfectly manicured garden in the style of the European aristocracy, Tania prefers a native garden that fosters plants indigenous to the land and gives these plants room to grow as they please. Property disputes are never simple to begin with, but these value differences make any sort of compromise with a shared strip of land out of the question.

Director Alicia Mendez plays up this complex nexus of ownership, interracial tensions, and aesthetic principles through taking advantage of the wide stage. When the characters are in Virginia and Frank’s yard, they behave in socially acceptable ways: sitting in the deck chairs to drink wine, admiring the garden beds from a distance unless it’s to carefully water or weed. In comparison, Tania and Pablo are far more relaxed in their own yard, not worried about being proper while still treating their plants with respect. Without spoiling too much, the inevitable climatic clash at the intersection of these two yards is a thrilling whirl of overlapping arguments, sharp actions, and heightened emotions.

Woodinville Rep’s production features four strong actors who shine both as an ensemble and individual performers. Alan Garcia sympathetically depicts Pablo as a man torn in many directions. He’s understandably defensive of their right to their legal property and eager to get this dispute solved before they host a garden party to impress his new law firm. Simultaneously, he’s uneasy about getting off on the wrong foot with their new neighbors, and – loyalty to his wife’s gardening philosophy aside – he deeply admires the cultivated beauty of Frank’s gardens. Patrick Hogan as Frank is good-humored and accomodating to his neighbors until the threat to his existing garden – his sense of self – ramps up, and then Hogan becomes more frightening beneath the amiable façade. He plays the victim when confronted, saying they can’t be blamed for using land they truly believed they owned and that it’s cruel to now take that land away, believably ignorant to the irony of a white man saying this to a Latinx couple.

Playing Tania is Valeria Aguirre, a woman unafraid to stand up for herself or her husband, but also exhausted by the neighborly dispute on top of their recent move, her pregnancy, her dissertation, and the unexpected stress of hosting a last-minute garden party. Her one outlet for stress is her native garden; the threat to her garden posed by the Butleys is both personal and existential, and we can feel the weight of the looming fight in Aguirre’s posture. Last but far from least is Christina Williams as Virginia, someone who initially feels kinship to her new neighbors before the relationship sours. She empathizes with Pablo being the only member of the BIPOC community at his office, as she is the only woman at her male-dominated engineering firm; Williams is brave in showing her character’s blindness to the fact that this similarity carries quite a lot of nuanced differences too. The scene between just Aguirre and Williams is one of the best, from the way they find common ground that allows them to bond, to the sharp escalations from civility to indignation to righteous anger.

Woodinville Repertory Theatre’s current production is an exploration of what we owe our loved ones, our neighbors, and ourselves. Their Native Gardens features direction that makes use of a unique performance space, actors unafraid to dive into the messier aspects of life, and high-caliber production design, all of which adds up to an in-depth interrogation of how what we owe one another changes based on historical context, socio-political realities, heritage, and the universal desire to belong.

Native Gardens runs on stage at Woodinville Repertory Theatre through May 24. For more information, including ticket availability and sales, visit www.woodinvillerep.org.

Photo credit: Sandro Menzel