Inside the Grand Opening Night of ‘Other Desert Cities’ on Broadway

The star-studded revival of John Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities drew an equally dazzling crowd for the play’s opening last night at the Hudson Theatre.

Directed by John Benjamin Hickey, the show stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Lily Rabe, and Joe Keery as the deliciously dysfunctional Wyeth family of Palm Springs—but there was no hint of the piece’s acrimony as friends and family of the cast and creators converged in the gilt lobby beforehand. Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, Bradley Whitford, Ina Garten, JJ Abrams, Michael Kors, Lance LePere, and Annie Leibovitz were some of the guests on hand to see the 2011 play—a Pulitzer Prize finalist—remounted.

“What you think is true…is not quite what you thought at all. And I think that’s fascinating. It’s true of life,” said Louis-Dreyfus pre-show, of the play’s meandering plot and gut-punch twist of an ending. Making her Broadway debut, Louis-Dreyfus plays Polly Wyeth, a vodka-swilling, Goyard-toting, Republican matriarch—more Bush, less Boebert—married to Lyman (Harris), an action star turned right-wing pol. Their two adult children, Brooke (Rabe) and Trip (Keery), converge at the family home—a stiflingly beige Palm Springs fantasia—for Christmas 2004. Joining them is Silda, Polly’s recently rehabbed alcoholic sister, played with devastating bite by Janney. Brooke, a flailing but accomplished writer, arrives home with a bombshell: a soon-to-be-published memoir of the family’s dirty laundry. Merry Christmas, indeed.

“Everyone is right and everyone is wrong,” said Rabe, in a crimson Wiederhoeft gown, on the familial backstabbing and recriminations of Baitz’s drawing-room Grand Guignol. Rabe, fresh off her run in A Winter’s Tale at the Delacorte in Central Park, had one day off before she began rehearsals for this play in September. “Winter’s Tale really did break everything open. It’s a wonderful place to start a new process from…when everything was just wide open.”