It’s only been 15 years since Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities premiered on New York stages. Even at that time, the show seemed like a throwback in many ways. Baitz had crafted a well-oiled dramedy in the Neil Simon tradition that veered from comedic zingers to Ibsenlike family melodrama by the final curtain. And he seemed fixated on exposing the hypocrisy of a certain kind of privileged Hollywood Republican family who had championed the early-2000s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan even though the pretense for those conflicts (those vaunted “weapons of mass destruction”) proved largely illusory in retrospect.
Now, actor-turned-director John Benjamin Hickey is overseeing a mostly solid revival featuring a starry cast who have boosted ticket prices to as high as $1,118. The main draw is Julia Louis-Dreyfus, making her Broadway debut as the matriarch of a family that made its mark in Hollywood and Republican politics before retiring to a staid existence in Palm Springs. Unlike Stockard Channing, who memorably originated the role of Polly Wyatt with a kind of laid-back noblesse oblige, Louis-Dreyfus brings a brittler, edgier quality to the role.
The multiple Emmy winner mercilessly delivers verbal zingers to her grown children (played by Lily Rabe and Stranger Things alum Joe Keery) and her sister and former screenwriting partner, Silda (Allison Janney). She’s more tightly wound, a woman who just has no chill or self-restraint when it comes to blurting out whatever happens to be on her mind. Her husband, Lyman (played by Ed Harris with the relaxed calm of an Old Hollywood legend), is a former movie star turned spokesman for California wines turned ambassador under Ronald Reagan who knows better than to publicly challenge his outspoken wife even when he’d much rather maintain the appearance of decorum and civility.
Polly’s combative streak has been a problem for her eldest child, Brooke, a writer who has struggled to find her footing since moving to the East Coast, publishing a novel six years ago, and going through a bout of depression that led to a year-long hospitalization. Now she’s back home for a holiday visit, with the manuscript of a new book that’s landed a major publisher (and an upcoming excerpt in The New Yorker). The work is not a novel but a tell-all memoir that will unearth a lot of bottled-up Wyatt family history — especially the circumstances around the death of eldest child, Henry, who rebelled against his parents’ conservative politics with tragic consequences.
Baitz does a wonderful job using the first act to set up the circumstances and personal dynamics of a family that emanates a surface level of perfection, an idea reinforced by Scott Pask’s well-appointed re-creation of a Palm Springs living room (bathed in natural-seeming desert light by Natasha Katz). Louis-Dreyfus and Rabe’s characters seem too temperamentally alike in their stubbornness to ever truly get along, while Harris projects a paternal reasonableness that makes you understand why he could have had a long career in Westerns. (The actor also shows a knack for physical comedy, re-enacting an improbably protracted death scene from one of his old films.)
There are two wild cards in the family dynamic. Janney’s Silda, a recovering alcoholic crashing with her sister after a long estrangement, still resents Polly for abandoning their liberal Jewish upbringing. The actress, who could just as easily play Polly, doesn’t look much like Louis-Dreyfus, but she brings a spikey energy to her scenes that’s only undercut by Hickey’s decision to strand her upstage and have her face away from the audience during several key moments in the second act.
The real surprise in the cast is Keery, another Broadway newbie who makes the most of his role as the baby brother who followed his parents into a modest Hollywood career (as a producer of trashy reality TV shows) and is accustomed to playing the mediator between his combative mother and sister. Keery’s a natural on stage, relaxing into plush furniture and delivering hard truths about the situation as he sees it with ruffle-no-feathers even-handedness that can bubble up into comedic exasperation. He’s not above teasing his family about their foibles, and acknowledging his own shortcomings: “Just because I am wasting my goddamn Stanford-Berkeley education making ironic and cheerful TV shows, doesn’t mean I’m not very, very much filled with despair.”
After setting the stage with a punchline-heavy first act, the tone shifts after intermission to a more serious drama where Rabe’s Brooke confronts her parents and presses them to open up after years of shutting down any difficult subject matter. When the memory chest is open, there’s no turning back. And Louis-Dreyfus steps up to the moment in a memorable series of speeches where she finally drops the carefully manicured, Missoni-inspired armor she’s been wearing for years (costumes by Tom Broecker) to reveal a rawer, appealingly vulnerable woman underneath.
The particular issues that forced Polly and Lyman’s silence seem to belong to a bygone time, and a generation that impulsively flinched at the rise of liberalism, anti-Vietnam War activism, and the spread of drugs. It’s a generation that believed that keeping a secret, even from those closest to you, was a necessary defense against the chaos of modernity. Such scruples may not matter so much anymore; hypocrisy doesn’t generate the same sense of lasting shame. But Other Desert Cities still speaks to us, conjuring a family that ultimately proves willing to confront its past transgressions, and to respond to them with a sense of grace. Despite all the squabbling and acting out, family values still hold sway. ★★★★☆
OTHER DESERT CITIES
Hudson Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through January 17 for $167 to $1,118