‘Other Desert Cities’ Broadway Review: Julia Louis-Dreyfus Gets Serious

It’s hard to imagine secrets or hints of repressed trauma surviving long under the glow of the Palm Springs sun that keeps things bright in the airy, open, big-windowed home of the wealthy family at Jon Robin Baitz’s center. Other desert towns, but survive these secrets, at least until they don’t.

Director John Benjamin Hickey’s revival of this always captivating play, in a production opening tonight at Broadway’s Hudson Theater, features a must-see cast of Julia Louis-Dreyfus (in her Broadway debut), Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Joe Keery and Lily Rabe, but bold names aren’t the only things that warrant Other Desert Cities‘ Hot ticket status. Although it may seem, in tone and performance, entirely different from the famous original 2011 production – of course, comparisons will be made, and not always to the benefit of the new version – Baitz’s play seems just as vital in today’s bitter political and social environment.

Don’t let this description suggest a stuffy, joyless evening at the theater – as if anything associated with the infinitely attractive Louis-Dreyfus could ever be joyless. THE Seinfeld And VEEP The star brings an inexhaustible supply of audience goodwill to everything she does, and if her performance as a wealthy, hard-nosed disciple of Reagan Republicanism falls short of the studied patrician steel Stockard Channing made a delicious meal of, Louis-Dreyfus’s more amiable (at least initially) interpretation is no less thoughtful, if a little less impactful.

Louis-Dreyfus plays Polly Wyeth, a former screenwriter for popular if light-hearted films about a plucky teenager (I imagine Gidget) married to a former Hollywood hunk turned Lyman ambassador (Ed Harris, but I imagine John Gavin) whose drift to the right over the years (the Wyeths are longtime friends of Ron and Nancy and various 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 Los Angeles-based producer of a cheesy Judge Judy-style courtroom show (with celebrity juries, no less) and Brooke (Lily Rabe), the black sheep author from Sag Harbor, plagued by deep depressions and pervasive sadness and anger.

No one could blame Brooke (although they do anyway): the Wyeth children were three, cut off by one with the suicide of her eldest son Henry years ago.

Set in the gorgeous, detail-free mid-century modern Palm Springs home to which the elder Wyeths retreated in the wake of Henry’s suicide scandal (he was, we learn, a left-wing radical somehow linked to a deadly Weather Underground-style bombing), the family has gathered for a rare reunion to celebrate Christmas 2004. The large, tastefully decorated Christmas tree is more than just a decoration: it’s a large tree lit in white. blames the Texan Jewish upbringing that Polly worked so hard to stifle with the Nancy-like poise and refined tones that seemed more natural to Pat Buckley. It’s no wonder that our first glimpse of Polly is post-tennis in a chic little blue-and-white (and no doubt tailored) athletic ensemble, her bob beautifully highlighted and jaw-grazing absolutely indifferent to the country club athletic feats she’s almost certainly just won.

But even this enormous tannenbaum is no match for Silda, whose bohemian panache – she wears discount Pucci – and her show-biz (read Jewish) leanings (she quotes Totie Fields) clearly irritate the disdainful Polly. Polly is so forgiving that we immediately side with Silda (and, of course, Janney, one of the few performers who can go toe-to-toe with Louis-Dreyfus in the likability department and who is greeted with wild applause upon her late entrance on stage).

On the battlefield that is House Wyeth, her daughter Brooke is definitely part of Team Silda. Actually, it’s Silda Plus. Sad and, in her way, as caustic as her mother, Brooke temporarily returned home after months of severe depression and years of writer’s block that led even her family to suspect she was a one-hit wonder after the publication of her famous first novel.

Well, surprise and Merry Christmas: Brooke came with gifts – her new, soon-to-be-published novel (and soon to be excerpted in The New Yorker), which isn’t a novel at all. It is a family memoir, filled with details of Henry’s suicide and the parental abandonment that led to it.

If the first act of the play is fraught with some relatively light intra-family pitfalls (Polly reproaches Brooke – with the instantly recognizable comic delivery of Louis-Dreyfus – by proclaiming that “sarcasm is the province of adolescents and homosexuals”) – Act II goes for the jugular. Mom and Dad have revealed the soon-to-be-revealed secrets that they say will be nothing less than a cruel public humiliation and an attempt to discredit all the family values ​​on which they (and their Republican friends and colleagues) have built their lives and staked their reputations.

Polly, in particular, is enraged (the more laid-back Lyman is, at least initially, more impartial – he simply refuses to read or comment on the large manuscript laid before him.) As the accusations and psychic injuries pile up, Henry’s story – where he went wrong, why he was wrong, and who was to blame – slowly emerges.

Without spoiling the big reveal of the second act, no one in this play – or in the audience – has an unquestionable claim to the truth. Even the proud and outspoken Silda shares only what she wants to share, and her conciliatory son Trip, occupying common ground (or rather no man’s land) between his parents and sister, cannot establish anything resembling a separate peace when he cannot know all the details of this war.

Whether or not Baitz’s writing (or Hickey’s directing) can fully support the big step we’re supposed to take will be determined by every person sitting in a seat at the Hudson Theater. Mine was occupied by someone who wasn’t entirely convinced, and I left the theater questioning the tale’s credibility to a degree I don’t remember 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 has completely convinced me of the overall credibility of the secrets revealed, or their plausibility beyond the dramatic demands of the plot.

However, there is no doubt that we to want follow this cast wherever it asks us to go, even if it’s a pretty big ask. The casting itself can sometimes seem hesitant, particularly Dreyfus during the heavy second act. At a few points in the play, an otherwise winning Harris, during the revised performance, still seemed to be working his way through the character and the storyline. Fortunately, we’re all more than willing to give him a bit of a break after a wonderful first-act scene in which his old acting persona recreates an old B-movie death scene that suggests Harris has played several himself.

Indeed, no actor as familiar and, yes, beloved as so many others in this cast can completely escape their own history, and why should they? We want to give Louis-Dreyfus’s Polly some benefit of the doubt because we still love Elaine Benes, an affection that serves the play’s dynamics and tensions well, and we love Janney’s Silda not only because of the character’s humanist politics (although there’s certainly that as well – some of her lines about the cruelties of a certain political party ring truer in this era than the play’s post-9/11 universe setting) but also because we have followed Janney since The west wing.

The two young actors may not have such long careers, but their talent easily justifies their growing reputations (Keery of Stranger things, Rabe of, among other credits, American Horror Story and a great list of stage performances). Keery’s charming performance in several truth-telling speeches proves that bad guys don’t get every juicy, crowd-pleasing moment.

Indeed, Rabe might have the toughest task of all, and not because she is regularly called upon to joust (sometimes loudly) with performers as talented and, I repeat, as beloved as Louis-Dreyfus and Harris. If some see Rabe’s righteously angry and often anguished characterization of hurt Brooke as, well, a bit a lota fairer way would be to say that we are witnessing the outbursts (directed outward and inward) of a young woman who carries all the pent-up rage of an imperfect child long stifled by the superficial 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, desert-modern elegance).

Rabe also beautifully carries the significant weight of the play’s famously ambiguous epilogue, to which director Hickey added a grace note that poses more questions than it answers. It is an absolutely legitimate choice of direction, although superfluous, and one that the playwright must surely have accepted. Yes, it’s a little frustrating with the speed of its execution and its vague reverberations, but Other Desert Cities is nothing more than a superbly crafted study in the malleability of truths long thought established. Of course, this requires reconsideration until the end.

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