Karen Zacarías’ Native Gardens is a didactic, heavy-handed play that’s inexplicably structured like a sitcom episode and even more inexplicably playing at Trinity Rep right now. A young and self-absorbed Latinx couple just bought their first house, a Georgetown fixer-upper right next door to a cranky gardener and a retired defense contractor. The plot gets pretty hammy right away and never gets better. The show’s lone saving grace is the performance by María Gabriela Rosado González, a second-year acting student in the Brown/Trinity MFA program. Hopefully we’ll get to see her again, ideally with better material.
The show happens twice on Sundays, at 2pm and 7:30pm