Karen Zacarías: Plays One

Native Gardens; The Book Club Play; Destiny of Desire

Karen Zacarías

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786826329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

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.

DESTINY OF DESIRE

An Unapologetic Telenovela in Two Acts

Destiny Of Desire was Originally Commissioned and Produced by Arena Stage, Washington, DC

Molly Smith, Artistic Director

Edgar Dobie, Executive Producer

“From the first it has been the theatre’s business to entertain people, as it also has of all the other arts. It is this business which always gives it its particular dignity; it needs no other passport than fun, but this it’s got to have. We should not in any way be giving it a higher status if we were to turn it, e.g., into a purveyor of morality; it would on the contrary run the risk of becoming debased, and this would occur just as soon as it failed to make its moral lesson enjoyable, and enjoyable to the senses at that – a principle, admittedly, by which morality can only gain. Not even instruction can be demanded of it; at any rate, no more utilitarian lesson than how to move pleasurably, whether in the physical or in the spiritual sphere. The theatre must in short, remain something entirely superfluous, though this also means that it is the superfluous for which we live. Nothing needs less justification than pleasures.”

–-Bertolt Brecht

A Short Organum For The Theatre (1948)

DESTINY OF DESIRE

By Karen Zacarías

An Unapologetic Telenovela in Two Acts

First Choice: AN ALL LATINO CAST

Second Choice: A very diverse cast

NOTES: The ten ACTORS (five women/five men) and hopefully one (or more) musicians enter and hang out or sit in chairs around the playing arena. The actors are both the ENSEMBLE ACTORS that employ Brechtian techniques of: Quotes and Titles and Songs. And they are the CHARACTERS of Destiny of Desire.

The actors’ individual back story is not important…but how we see them collectively supporting the action in the playing arena is vital. They construct the story. Once they enter as characters of Destiny of Desire: they are always truthful, committed, and in the moment when in a scene. We can see them watch on the sidelines as the action unfolds.

No camp. No fake Spanish accents (real ones are fine). DELIVERY should be Intense and Sharp and Clear with Great Pacing. Think on the Line. Communicating without explaining. Heightened but centered.

In my mind: Destiny of Desire is Beautiful Extravagant Poor Theater. There is a heightened theatricality to the story; it is a delicious populist Greek tragedy, but it is still grounded in the humanity of joy and suffering, and steeped in the culture and community that creates it and celebrates it.

The Brechtian quotes must be current national facts that (progressively) contextualize the issue in the scene. If the play is performed in the U.S., the facts must be about the U.S. If performed in Mexico or Bulgaria…the facts must correspond to the country of performance. FYI: Sources for the current quotes are at the end of this script.

Setting: An abandoned theater in (hometown).

ACT I

Scene 1: Life, Death And Destiny

Scene 2: A Chance Encounter

Scene 3: Betrayal And Unexpected Outcome

Scene 4: Mothers And Daughters

Scene 5: Secrets And Lies

Scene 6: More Secrets And Lies

Scene 7: Servants, Poets…Sisters?

Scene 8: Taking A Chance On Love

Scene 9: A Surprising Turn Of Events

A BREAK IN THE ACTION

ACT II

Scene 1: Sorrow And Loss

Scene 2: Regrets Over Drinks

Scene 3: ...