Just Deserts
The revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities—just opened on Broadway in a nimble production directed by John Benjamin Hickey—raises two pressing questions that I will answer right away. (1) Yes, the TV superstar Julia Louis-Dreyfus—appearing onstage for the first time since college, whose casting has driven ticket prices past $800—is actually damn good. And (2) Yes, the play—a much-acclaimed family-Christmas dustup that keeps its cards cleverly hidden and unearths surprising political and personal skeletons—holds up quite well after 15 years.
I remember liking this solid and moving play when it was new, and I still like it. Yet it lands in a very different way today than at its 2011 premiere, largely because of how vastly the world and the country have changed.
The core of Other Desert Cities is a wrenching family story, set mostly in 2004, about painful buried secrets. It originally worked as a kind of cautionary tale about what’s lost when people who share close bonds reduce one another to political labels and stereotypes. Yet because its background is a Bush-era America in which both major political parties tout genuine principles and regularly engage in reasonable and civil discourse, the world of the play now feels quaint to the point of archaism. In the casually brutal Trumplandia we’re now enduring, a story about recovering love by talking through knotty differences feels like a throwback, less comically realistic than mournfully nostalgic.
Other Desert Cities takes place over a long Christmas eve in the luxurious Palm Springs home of Polly and Lyman Wyeth, a wealthy couple who made their names in mid-century Hollywood (he as a Reaganesque movie star, she as a screenwriter) and then became fixtures in the blue-blood Republican establishment. Their grown children—Trip, producer of a comic court-TV show, and Brooke, a respected writer living in Sag Harbor who has struggled with depression—disdain their politics but love them enough to come for the holidays.
The catalyst of the blowup is Brooke’s new book manuscript, which she has brought along and wants everyone to read and react to (it’s already sold and excerpts will soon appear in The New Yorker). Its subject is the Wyeths’s third child Henry, whom the parents avoid talking about, who disappeared (presumably a suicide) after being radicalized and involved in a terrorist bombing of an army recruiting station. Henry was Brooke’s best friend, his disappearance destroyed her peace and sanity, and she blames their parents for driving him to extremism, then abandoning him in need.
If that sounds heavy, it is, and one of the distinctive features of Other Desert Cities is how long and effectively it keeps its weightiness hidden. For most of the first act, the dialogue skips along very breezy surfaces. Polly is given dozens of quippy zingers that paint her as a sitcom type—the domineering matriarch who can scorch with a word—which is of course juicy red meat to an old pro like Louis-Dreyfus. Lyman seems like he’s all shell too at first—the smiling, image-conscious traditionalist, the ruggedly handsome guy who doesn’t rock boats—and Ed Harris captures this stoic unflappability with the same effortless aplomb.
All the other actors are trusty too at their breezy preliminaries. Lily Rabe adeptly establishes Brooke as the clan’s brooding, dark-edged troublemaker, and Joe Keery genially plays Trip as the fair-minded family referee. Also in the mix is Silda, Polly’s alcoholic sister and one-time screenwriting partner, who is recovering from a slip and has been secretly helping Brooke with her book. It’s a hoot to see Allison Janney—currently playing the sententious President of the United States in The Diplomat—in another morally superior role that’s wholly disempowered.
The most impressive feature of Other Desert Cities is the swiftness with which it suddenly discards all this lightness and plunges the family into a serious confrontation with their past. Fascinatingly, this showdown takes aim not only at their actions and beliefs but also at their long-tended performative personas. The climax in the last half hour requires intense new resources from the actors, and it should be said that not everyone in this cast rises equally to the challenge. Some are more convincing than others. It’s a pleasure to report that Louis-Dreyfus is among the strongest. In her final monologue, her already intense performance finds a new gear and grows positively stately in extreme vulnerability.
I spied a hint of this deeper dimension to the performance even in Act 1. I happened to be looking at Louis-Dreyfus at a moment when Rabe was speaking, spitting out Brooke’s first hard questions about her parents’ thin explanation of Henry’s suicide. During those jabs, Louis-Dreyfus winced, sharply, then quickly resumed her steely façade. It was just a simple, passing actor’s reaction, nothing you would normally single out for praise, but I felt it was nevertheless remarkable because it so unmistakably demonstrated a megastar’s professional presence, concentration, and commitment to effective ensemble. Also, the wince pointedly foreshadowed the crisis to come.
The final crisis and plot twist of this work—which unfortunately can’t be described without spoiling the ending for first-time viewers—are the reasons it has been praised by critics over the years for its insights into the American national character. The drama is not just about a family showdown but also about stripping away facades in pursuit of a genuinely shared truth. That unexpected unmasking event still has great poignancy, particularly at the terrible moment we’re now living through when Truth is so worryingly contingent.
By Jon Robin Baitz
Directed by John Benjamin Hickey
Hudson Theatre
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