It’s hard to imagine any secrets or hints of repressed trauma surviving long in the glare of Palm Springs sunshine that keeps things bright in the airy, open-floor, large windowed home of the moneyed family at the center of Jon Robin Baitz’ Other Desert Cities, but survive those secrets do, at least until they don’t.
Director John Benjamin Hickey’s revival of this ever-captivating play, in a production opening at Broadway‘s Hudson Theatre tonight, features a must-see cast of Julia Louis-Dreyfus (in her Broadway debut), Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Joe Keery and Lily Rabe, but the bold names aren’t the only things that justify Other Desert Cities‘ hot ticket status. Though it can feel, in tone and performance, altogether different than the acclaimed original 2011 production – of course comparisons will be made, and not always to the benefit of the new take – Baitz’ play seems just as vital in today’s bitterly divisive political and social environment.
Don’t let that description suggest a stuffy, joyless evening in the theater – as if anything associated with the endlessly appealing Louis-Dreyfus could ever be joyless. The Seinfeld and VEEP star brings an inexhaustible supply of audience good will to everything she does, and if her performance as this wealthy, unbending disciple of Reagan Republicanism is short on the studied patrician steeliness that Stockard Channing made a delicious meal of, Louis-Dreyfus’ more amiable (at least initially) interpretation is no less thoughtful if bit less impactful.
Louis-Dreyfus plays Polly Wyeth, a former screenwriter of popular if slight movies about a spunky teen girl (I’m picturing Gidget) married to a former Hollywood hunk-turned-ambassador Lyman (Ed Harris, but I’m picturing John Gavin) whose rightward drift over the years (the Wyeths are longtime friends of Ron and Nancy and various assorted Bushes) leaves her at odds with her liberal, recently sober sister (and former writing partner) Silda (Allison Janney) and the Wyeths’ two adult children – Trip (Joe Keery), the LA-based producer of a cheesy Judge Judy-esque courtroom show (with celebrity juries, no less) and Brooke (Lily Rabe), the black sheep Sag Harbor-ensconced author given to deep depressions and pervasive gloom and anger.
No one could blame Brooke (though they do anyway): The Wyeth children used to be three, cut by one with the suicide of eldest son Henry years ago.
Set in the gorgeous, no-detail-out-of-place Mid-Century modern Palm Springs home to which the elder Wyeths retreated in the scandalous aftermath of Henry’s suicide (he was, we learn, a left-wing radical somehow connected to a deadly Weather Underground-style bombing), the family has gathered for a rare reunion to celebrate Christmas 2004. The big, tastefully decorated Christmas tree is more than mere decoration: It’s a big, white-lighted rebuke to the Texas-Jewish upbringing that Polly has worked so hard to squelch through Nancy-esque poise and the refined tones that seemed more natural to Pat Buckley. Any wonder our first glimpse of Polly is après-tennis in chic little blue and white (and no-doubt-tailored) athletic ensemble, her beautifully highlighted, jawline-skimming bob absolutely unmussed by whatever feats of country club athletics she’s almost certainly just won.
But even that huge tannenbaum is no match for Silda, whose bohemian panache – she wears discount Pucci – and show-biz (read Jewish) inclinations (she quotes Totie Fields) clearly grates on the disdainful Polly. So ungiving is Polly that we instantly side with Silda (and, of course, Janney, one of few performers who can go head-to-head with Louis-Dreyfus in the likability department and who is greeted with wild applause upon her delayed entrance on stage).
In the choose-sides battleground that is the Wyeth home, daughter Brooke is defintely on Team Silda. In fact, she’s Silda Plus. Rueful and, in her own way, as caustic as her mother, Brooke has temporarily returned to the fold following months of serious depression and years of a writer’s block that had even her family suspecting she was a one-hit wonder after the publication of her celebrated debut novel.
Well, surprise and Merry Christmas: Brooke has come bearing gifts – her new, soon-to-be-published novel (and sooner to be excerpted in The New Yorker) that isn’t a novel at all. It’s a family memoir, stuffed with the details of the troubled Henry’s suicide and the parental abandonment that led to it.
If the play’s first act is loaded with some comparatively light intra-family needling (Polly upbraids Brooke – with Louis-Dreyfus’ immediately recognizable comic delivery – by proclaiming “sarcasm is the purview of teenagers and homosexuals”) – Act II goes for the jugular. Mom and dad have flipped out over the soon-to-be spilled secrets that they believe will be nothing less than cruel public humiliation and an attempted discrediting of all the family values on which they (and their Republican friends and colleagues) have built lives and staked reputations.
Polly, in particular, is enraged (the more easy-going Lyman is, at least initially, more even-handed – he simply refuses to read, or comment on, the hefty manuscript plunked before him.) As accusations and remembered psychic injuries pile up, the story of Henry – where he went wrong, why he went wrong and who was to blame – slowly emerges.
Without spoiling the big second-act reveal, no one in this play – or in the audience – has an unchallengeable claim on the truth. Even the proudly-forthright Silda shares only what she wants to share, and conciliatory son Trip, occupying a middle-ground (or rather a no-man’s-land) between parents and sister, can’t possibly establish anything like a separate peace when he can’t possibly know the full details of this war.
Whether or not Baitz’ writing (or Hickey’s direction) can wholly support the major leap we’re eventually expected to take will be determined by each person in a Hudson Theatre seat. Mine was occupied by someone not entirely convinced, and I left the theater questioning the tale’s credibility to a degree I don’t recall asking when I saw the original production 15 years ago (the play or my memory? who’s to say). There are a few clues along the way that, in retrospect, support the big twist, but nothing fully persuaded me of the overall credibility of the secrets exposed, or their plausibility beyond the dramatic demands of plot.
Still, there’s no doubt that we want to follow this cast wherever it asks us to go, even when that’s a pretty big ask. The cast itself can occasionally seem tentative, particularly Dreyfus during the heavy second act. At a few points during the play an otherwise winning Harris, at the reviewed performance, still seemed to be finding his way through the character and the script. Fortunately we’re all more than willing to cut him some slack after a wonderful scene in the first act in which his former-actor character recreates an old B-movie death scene that suggest Harris has played more than a few of these himself.
Indeed, no actor as familiar and, yes, beloved as so many in this cast can completely escape their own histories, and why should they? We want to give Louis-Dreyfus’ Polly a certain benefit of the doubt because we still love Elaine Benes, an affection that well-serves the play’s dynamic and tensions, and we take to Janney’s Silda not only because of the character’s humanist politics (though there’s certainly that too – some of her lines about the cruelties of a certain political party ring truer in this era than the play’s in-universe post-9/11 setting) but also because we’ve followed Janney since The West Wing.
The two younger actors might not have those lengthy careers but their talent easily justifies their growing reputations (Keery from Stranger Things, Rabe from, among other credits, American Horror Story and a fine roster of stage performances). Keery’s charming delivery of several truth-telling speeches proves that villains don’t get all the juicy, crowd-pleasing moments.
Indeed, Rabe might just have the toughest job of all, and not because she is regularly called upon to joust (sometimes loudly) with performers as skilled and, to repeat, beloved as Louis-Dreyfus and Harris. If some will see Rabe’s righteously angry, often anguished characterization of the wounded Brooke as, well, a bit much, a fairer way is to say we’re bearing witness to the explosions (outward-directed and inward) of a young woman who bears all the pent-up rage of an imperfect child long-smothered by the surface perfectionism of a tyrannical mother. (And kudos to Scott Pask for a set-designed Palm Springs interior that pretty much defines perfectionism with its smug, moderne, desert elegance).
Rabe also beautifully carries the significant weight of the play’s famously ambiguous epilogue, to which director Hickey has added a blink-and-miss-it grace note that poses more questions than it answers. That’s an absolutely legitimate, if superfluous, directorial choice, and one that the playwright surely must have okayed. Yes, it’s a bit frustrating in the fleetness of its execution and vague reverberations, but Other Desert Cities is nothing if not an exquisitely designed study of the malleability of truths long believed settled. Of course it demands reconsiderations, right up to the very end.
Title: Other Desert Cities
Venue: Broadway’s Hudson Theater
Written By: Jon Robin Baitz
Directed By: John Benjamin Hickey
Cast: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Joe Keery, Lily Rabe
Running Time: 2 hr 30 min (including intermission)