Allison Janney and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Other desert towns, at the Hudson Theater.
Photo: Emilio Madrid
If for some reason you want to feel like you’re in 2011 or even 2004 again (and pay $800 to do it!), Other Desert Cities is happy to be of service to you. Returning to Broadway 15 years after its premiere, plus seven years from when most of its action takes place, Jon Robin Baitz’s play about the wealthy family with secrets is, in its current form, a trippy experience at best. More often than not, this slightly amusing moving sensation (where am I? When am I? Look, it’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus!) turns into something harder to swallow. The play adopts a pose of cultural commentary – even of heavyweight drama; it was nominated for a Pulitzer in 2012 – but its essence is more daytime soap than scathing cry of the heart. Politics, as was still possible on many stages fifteen years ago, is the spice added to the deeply standardized meat and potatoes of its structure. To continue the metaphor, if the play were a meal prepared by its central matriarch, Polly Wyeth — a caustic SoCal retiree who works with Nancy Reagan and wants to know when everyone became “so sensitive about everything” — she would probably introduce it with a wink and describe it as ethnic.
Or maybe she’d just call it “Chink food,” real words dropped by the character so early that we’ve barely finished settling into our seats. Are we supposed to approve of them? Of course not, but that’s not the point. Baitz’s play draws on the kind of humor that we have finally, over the past fifteen years, begun to recognize for what it is: a neoliberal complacency that leaves enough space for the Pollys and Polly sympathizers of the world to laugh safely in the dark for a thrill of “”Oh, that’s mean, but damn, I Also I’m so tired of political correctness» crosses the air. If we want to turn Broadway into a machine that lets people sit near celebrities for an exorbitant price, can’t we at least put those celebrities in rooms that seem less old-fashioned? (Maybe even any new ones?) Like too many commercial productions, Other Desert Cities is not particularly interested in what theater can or could do other than structure itself around a certain group of famous people. Alongside Louis-Dreyfus’ Polly are Ed Harris as her husband, an all-American movie star turned politician in the Reagan-Eastwood-Wayne stable named Lyman; Allison Janney as Elaine Stritch-ian, recently wagon sister, Silda; Lily Rabe as Polly and Lyman’s daughter Brooke, a writer struggling with depression; and Joe Keery (aka Djo and/or Steve from Stranger Things) as their son Trip, the cynical, pleasure-oriented peacekeeper to Brooke’s brooding and provocative truth-seeker.
The fact that Polly and Lyman, who live in a house that resembles a Palm Springs Hilton, are “old-guard Hollywood Republicans” and that their Gen It would be the old Mémoires system which threatens to say everything. After a long stay in a psychiatric hospital and several more years in the Northeast among freedom-hating liberal elites, Brooke wrote a book that she not only sold “to the first to read it,” but excerpts of which will soon be published in The New Yorker. Brooke returned to the family estate in the California desert on Christmas Eve, carrying copies of her manuscript like a sinister Santa Claus. She wants her family’s blessing before the publishing machine gets rolling, but, as she tells her brother, it “isn’t going to be that easy” because the book “is about Henry. who we can’t talk about, it’s about our brother, who went to war with our parents, joined a cult, disappeared, then planted a bomb in a military recruiting station, then killed himself – that’s what it’s really about.”
At least, as the practical talk says, it’s honest. The psychic scar left by the eldest Wyeth boy: was he the perfect brother or a reckless drug addict or a courageous anti-war radical? And why, Brooke worries, didn’t their parents try to help her before it was too late? — East What all that it’s actually about. Baitz’s title wants us to think, among other things, of Baghdad, where “so many people are dying in a desert, thousands of miles away”, Silda criticizes her sister, but we can’t really focus on something for which the play has so little formal curiosity. It’s like we’re at a dinner party listening to mindless gossip and every now and then the television in the other room mutters something about the morbid state of the world. Everyone will take a little pause to nod – yes, things are there. badbut tell us now about Henry. For production in 2026, it is also a major obstacle to allow us to really care about the struggles of these very wealthy Bush supporters and their daughter who apparently had to spend five minutes buying his trauma-inspired autofiction. The revival of the game as John Benjamin Hickey more frequently chooses to pretend that the obstacle is not there.
As the author of this autofiction, Brooke is our real protagonist, the audience’s stand-in – she’s a writer who decamped to New York, so of course she is. But above all like Other Desert Cities progresses, there is something nauseating about the way his life has been mutilated, not by his parents but by his playwright. Pleading, then essentially threatening, for information about his brother is the character’s primary function. And although Baitz doesn’t give a literal age, Brooke isn’t really a child: It’s 2004, and the war that drove a tragic wedge between her parents and older brother was Vietnam. Presumably around 40 years old, she’s been defined by a single trauma since she was a young teenager, which isn’t so much unbelievable as uninteresting. As a character, she is too stocky and dark to be convincing; we should sympathize with her, but she does not inflame our hearts. It’s a difficult role, and Rabe seems actively uncomfortable. When she is standing, her knees are almost always bent unnaturally, as if she is trying to hide her height. All she has to say is bewilderment and pain, and that one note wears thin pretty quickly.
It is not surprising that Other Desert Cities heading towards a big turning point – theater of the 2010s love domestic skirmish followed by a shocking eleventh-hour revelation – and to talk about the play in its entirety would have to spoil it. I won’t, but suffice to say it’s the kind of retcon that’s only satisfying if you don’t dwell on it too much. Especially when it comes to poor Brooke. Her life – not to mention Trip’s, although Keery is squirrelled to the back of the stage during the climax – is rewritten in the show’s final 15 minutes, as a new trauma is sold to us as the resolution to the old. It took Brooke around thirty years of writer’s block and suicidal thoughts to struggle with her experiences; it takes him 30 seconds of screaming monologue to move through the crisis toward catharsis.
Everything I put here at Baitz’s door doesn’t just belong to Other Desert Cities but to a whole genre of modern American playwriting, one that makes its audience feel like they’re grappling with something serious while actually encouraging their brains to relax into classic melodrama. The pleasures of such pieces are not holistic – they come in flashes, like, say, a centerpiece of a withering speech that Keery delivers with a touch of madness while rolling a joint, or every time Allison Janney speaks. For a while, I thought Louis-Dreyfus had been miscast as Polly and that Janney – tougher, drier, more exposed claws – was the real person for the role. But Janney is so good at everything she does, including throwing shade while walking around in caftans, that I quickly embraced her hunched, not-so-secretly pitiful Silda. As for Polly, Louis-Dreyfus doesn’t terrify us in the role – and she and Rabe never really seem to mesh as mother and daughter – but she fills it with a different kind of power. She’s not a Stockard Channing (who originated the role in the show’s Broadway and Broadway premiere). She’s nicer than that, without Channing’s preternatural acerbity. There’s a natural feistiness about her that she mostly strives to reinforce here, but which paints its own picture, that of a perfect housewife who was once a comedy writer but quit so she could support her husband as he joined Ronnie’s firm. At the same time, Harris, older than the women, moves and sounds like the old cowboys, with a touching note of sorrow—the lion dying and dying of regret—resonating throughout his performance. If only these actors could devote themselves to material more worthy of our entire era. And if only their names, as talented as they are, didn’t play such a big role in an increasingly discouraging match.
Other Desert Cities is at the Hudson Theater.
Gn entert
