Karen Zacarías: Plays One: Native Gardens; The Book Club Play; Destiny of Desire (Oberon Modern Playwrights)

Karen Zacarías was recently hailed by American Theater Magazine as one of the ten most produced playwrights in the US. Collected here for the first time are three of Zacarías’ award-winning plays – Native Gardens, The Book Club Play, and Destiny of Desire – three works that explore American and Latino life today with Zacarías’ trademark humour, heart, and narrative wit.

Zacarías’ further works include The Copper Children, Legacy of Light, Mariela in the Desert, The Sins of Sor Juana, and adaptations of Just Like Us, Into the Beautiful North, and How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent. She is also the author of ten renowned TYA musicals (including Ella Enchanted), and a core founder of the Latinx Theatre Commons and founder of the award-winning Young Playwrights’ Theater. She is an inaugural 2019 Sine Fellow for Policy Innovation at American University, and just received the 2019 Lee Reynolds Award for her work in theatre and social change. Voted a Washingtonian of the Year 2018, Karen lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband and three children.



The Book Club Play

“Book Club is like Lord of the Flies with Wine and Dip”

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.

“A delightful, fresh comedy.” Talkin’ Broadway



Destiny of Desire

“An unapologetic and subversive Telenovela for the Stage”

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. “A writer of comedic skill” (Variety), Karen Zacarías infuses the Mexican telenovela genre with music, high drama and burning passion to make for a fast-paced modern comedy.

“Terrifically entertaining theatrical roller-coaster “Destiny of Desire…is a zany, funny delight”

– LA Times – Charles McNulty



Native Gardens

A hilarious hot-button comedy.

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.

“Native Gardens is a true breath of comic fresh air. It’s a biting, perceptive, and ultimately hopeful sendup to our fraught relationships with those around us – even right next door. Beyond snappy one-liners and garden hose fights, the play challenges audiences to look beyond petty differences and rediscover our shared decency.” – DC Theatre Scene