What if there was a second Ronald Reagan? It’s a troubling question, and one that playwright Jon Robin Baitz posed in his 2011 Pulitzer-finalist play Other Desert Cities. A classic coming-home family drama, Other Desert Cities was last on Broadway that same year, when its study of neocon order running headlong into its rotten, self-serving legacy was hot-button relevant. The play, largely set in 2004, opens with talk of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, before settling into its more allegorical story of the troubled liberal daughter of Palm Springs Republicans returning to the nest with the worst kind of Christmas gift under her arm: manuscripts of a damning, soon-to-be-published family memoir.
The Wyeths, Polly (Julia Louis-Dreyfus in her Broadway debut) and Lyman (Ed Harris), are grand poobahs of the conservative establishment, once close friends of the Reagans and other miserable people (Barry Goldwater is mentioned). Lyman, like dear old Dutch, was a low-tier movie star before Reagan gave him an ambassadorship. Polly, unlike Nancy, is Jewish and wrote a forgettable series of made-for-TV movies with her sister before higher purpose, and more money, came calling. Retired from showbiz and politics, the Wyeths enjoy their country club socializing and their well-appointed mid-century home but, it seems, not always the company of their children.
Baby boy Trip (Joe Keery) is the caddish, porn-addicted creator of a People’s Court-esque reality show called Jury of Your Peers, the gag being that the jury is made up of faded icons and D-listers. Though no great pride of his parents’, Trip is close to them in the infantilized way of youngest children, and is far more apathetic to their increasingly creaky (and dangerous) politics than is his sister Brooke (Lily Rabe), a black sheep who long ago decamped to the East Coast, where a marriage crumbled and some months were spent in a psychiatric hospital.
The American moment in which Brooke and her parents find themselves — just after George W. Bush’s second election victory — is a fraught one for such ideological divides within a family, the respective sides pushed further from one another as the nation dumbs itself with modern media and tilts into what could become another Vietnam. But more poignantly ailing the Wyeths, maybe, is the ghost of Polly and Lyman’s eldest son, Henry, who dropped out and burnt out before taking his own life following a Weather Underground-esque bombing that killed a security guard at an Army recruitment facility.
That’s 30 years in the past, though, which is where the family has largely kept that pain, until Brooke announces that she’s written the book that will till the earth of their tragedy for all to see. Horrified parents thus turn on addled daughter, with aimless, amoral son caught in the middle.
Minus the specific details, this is a familiar set-up in the American theater; anyone weaned on the medium is well (and perhaps fondly) aware of the squabbling, big-gesture, family-secret genre. We just saw it in sterling form on Broadway recently, in two awards-bedecked plays from the same playwright: Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’ companion-piece barn burners Appropriate and Purpose. It’s a hoary but still fecund form — I’m tempted to make the contention that almost every great playwright worth their salt must have their version of a juicy living-room brawl in their portfolio.
When it first debuted, Other Desert Cities — the title referring to a sign on the highway approaching Palm Springs, but perhaps also alluding to places in faraway countries that were being bombed and invaded at the time of the story — was hailed as one of the greats of its kind. Theatergoers in the elated and relieved first blushes of the Obama age were hungry for plays that looked back at the terrible destruction and numbskullery of the Bush years, eager to sift through the rubble and find some piercing insight that might put all that horror in its proper context. And to have a laugh, too, now that dinosaurs like Polly and Lyman had been proven so terribly wrong.
I saw the play back then, and was rattled and moved and amused by it, just as so many others were. It was a pleasure to watch Stockard Channing as Polly, playing the dark inverse of her solid-liberal first lady character on The West Wing; to sit in the rumbling majesty of Stacy Keach as grizzly old teddy bear Lyman; to enjoy Judith Light wryly staggering around as Polly’s tenuously sober sister, Silda (played in this production by Allison Janney). And the cri de coeur of Baitz’s writing made its impact, too: His portrait of wealthy and once powerful right-wingers stranded on the wrong side of history felt like a smug and bitterly sad goodbye to an era, to an entire ethos over which we had just triumphed.
In hindsight, of course, that was an awfully presumptuous sentiment. Baitz could in no way have predicted what would come belching out of hell in the wake of Obama optimism, which makes much of Other Desert Cities seem like an ossified, naïve period piece. And yet there is still some pertinence to be mined; plenty of liberal kids are currently railing against the cold self-dealing of their rich, Trump-voting parents. At least, that’s the value that the producers of this new production at the Hudson Theatre might have seen in the text.
In order to really sell this political-meets-personal drama in the present day, they’d need a starry cast, and one has indeed been impressively assembled. The A-list ensemble has made Other Desert Cities one of the hottest tickets of the fall season; as proof of that, my audience was stacked with celebrities, there to either cheer on their peers or stew enviously in their success.
The latter camp wasn’t given much reason to sulk, though. This Other Desert Cities, directed by John Benjamin Hickey, is wobbly from the start, off-rhythm and woefully imbalanced in its performances. The biggest draw here is no doubt Louis-Dreyfus, a TV comedy icon who has won 11 Emmys and a Mark Twain Prize. Sharp, nimble and unafraid of humor’s dark corners, Louis-Dreyfus is a legend for good reason. She has also proved an adept dramatic actress in two Nicole Holofcener films, Enough Said and You Hurt My Feelings, performances that should have garnered far more acclaim than they did. I don’t know anyone who loves the filmed arts who doesn’t also love Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Which is why it’s such a shame to report that she really doesn’t work here.
Louis-Dreyfus leans too hard on the sitcom-y beats of Baitz’s early banter, which sets her up poorly for the towering drama to come. Polly is spoken about as the lion of the household, a force of nature who ruthlessly commands her family in a cute tennis skirt or boho, Saks-outing maxi dress. Louis-Dreyfus, though, communicates little of that power; she’s too airy and chipper, never giving us the sense that Polly is firmly planted in the bedrock of her world.
While Louis-Dreyfus deftly lands a few killer lines, and does achingly register some of the sadder stretches, Channing’s moody gravitas is sorely missed, especially when Polly gets angry. Pinched and peppery worked really well for Louis-Dreyfus on Veep, but Polly’s rage is meant to be a deeper, more elemental threat, one amassed to conceal an ocean of pain and regret. We pick up little of that layered complexity in this performance.
Harris, on the night I saw him at least, seems lost, failing to find the music in Lyman’s shift from supportive dad to titan indignantly defending his master-of-the-universe life choices. I found myself wondering if Harris was maybe going up on his lines a little; there were sudden breaks in tempo that suggested an actor grasping for the next measure. Perhaps to make up for Louis-Dreyfus’ flimsiness and Harris’ willowy presence, Rabe turns the melodrama knob up too high, churning the play’s second act into a sometimes illegible howl of despair. Janney, such a smooth pro on stage, tries to keep things grounded and in motion, but can’t really find her place in this out-of-sync ensemble.
The best acting is done by Stranger Things star Keery, who credibly embodies a young man whose privilege and access have certainly made him cynical, but not yet entirely indecent. He is simply the spoiled, listless baby of a family whom he is too young to have known at their mightiest, before the postlapsarian retreat to the desert, buried child in tow. Keery nails the way that guys of a certain stripe tend to pivot between snark and sensitivity, punctuating real feelings with a joke or a nihilistic provocation. He understands the intended tone of Baitz’s rickety dynasty, the clan’s haughty but not entirely confident put-on that through even this, they — like a noble idea of old America itself — shall endure.
Keery’s best moment comes at the start of act two, when he fizzily delivers a biting monologue about the banalities and anxieties of his existence. One hopes that this welcome clarity and energy will sustain through the rest of the play, but Hickey all too soon lets the tension sag.
The entire back half of Other Desert Cities is meant to build to a grand reveal that bares a stark truth about the Wyeths’ hypocrisy, about the parents’ failure to live public principle in private, or the other way around. That shock is severely dampened by Hickey’s enervating pacing; there is nothing steady about the build here, the line graph of the production instead one of sudden lurches.
Only the lovely writing at the very end of the play — when one character in a pool of light reflects, years later, on what all of this led to — delivers a swell of heady emotion. Just about everything else in this expensively populated place is arid, overheated and woefully devoid of life.
Venue: Hudson Theatre, New York
Producers: Bad Robot Live, ATG Productions, Gavin Kalin Productions
Cast: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Lily Rabe, Joe Keery
Director: John Benjamin Hickey
Writer: Jon Robin Baitz
Costumes: Tom Broecker
Set: Scott Pask
Lighting: Natasha Katz
Casting: Jim Carnahan
2 hours and 30 minutes (with intermission)