The result, though occasionally funny, is a genuine display of ugliness on both sides, and everyone involved spends the play alternating between exuberance and contrition over how far off the deep end they’re prepared to go for these two feet of dirt.
Turning a suburban squabble over a property line into high art is for Zacarias a matter of making the land stand for something. By the end, the Butleys have become the frantic and unwitting imperialists who stole valuable property from the rightfully entitled if vaguely sharklike Del Valles. But the tactics, not the goal, are what interest me here. To me this genteel backyard death match sounds like the dying cry of an illusion, a last homage to the notion of compromise between antagonistic parties that characterized the Obama era. In 2017, hopes extinguished, we are back in a world where people want different, irreconcilable things. Frank movingly and credibly loves his flowers. Tania has a head full of the latest jargon in identity politics to spew at uninterested and intractable Virginia. Pablo, in a candid moment, admits he doesn’t see why his happiness should hinge on “some old people we don’t even know.” Nobody wants to give an inch. It’s terrifying. The happy ending, which involves a fence, feels fake now. v
