Other Desert Towns review – Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Ed Harris shine in timely Broadway revival | Broadway

J.Just in time for the holidays, Jon Robin Baitz’s family reunion drama Other Desert Cities returns with an even more star-studded cast than its 2011 premiere. The revival is making headlines for marking the stage debuts of Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Joe Keery, alongside the Broadway returns of Ed Harris, Allison Janney and Lily Rabe.

But if this raises eyebrows as a takeover of the Hollywood conceit, those concerns are easily assuaged by the performances – especially those of new arrivals. John Benjamin Hickey’s staging is well suited to the abilities of his actors, largely justifying his rapid return to Broadway. This Pulitzer finalist piece still has a lot to say.

The question of what to say weighs heavily on the Wyeth family, as daughter Brooke (Rabe) returns to her parents’ posh Palm Springs home for Christmas with a manuscript of her upcoming memoir.

It’s 2004, and the public has almost forgotten that one of the sons of this Republican dynasty – led by Lyman (Harris) and Polly (Louis-Dreyfus), former Hollywood figures who followed their friends, the Reagans, into the more lucrative world of politics – was involved in a domestic terrorist attack before committing suicide.

His death threw the liberal Brooke off course, but she has now found some peace through her memoir and is seeking her parents’ blessing to publish it. That their peace is now threatened delights Silda (Janney), Polly’s sister and former writing partner, now a recovering alcoholic. She and Brooke share a righteous indignation that the family’s self-interest led to its collapse; a belief that is broadcast in memories.

What these black sheep don’t want to admit is that their indulgence—in matters of drinking, pity, or public excoriation—might be their own form of selfishness.

Brooke’s brother, Trip (Keery), is a successful reality TV producer with one foot outside the fight and a handful of flight options on hand if tensions get too high. He is too young to remember his brother’s death and therefore has a different view of the family dynamic.

Louis-Dreyfus is impeccable, his turns toward the ice truly chilling as a study of decorum in action; the venom she has difficulty holding back seeps between her teeth. (She also looks great in Tom Broecker’s perfect suits and a first lady bob given to her by hair and wig designer Robert Pickens.)

With his born gravitas and voice, Harris is the perfect patrician, which makes the cracks in his steel all the more heartbreaking. And Keery wins this season’s Alden Ehrenreich Prize for the best revelation who should never leave the stage.

Janney is supposed to be great as a sardonic lady, although perhaps too adorable for a character who could benefit from darker shadows. Rabe, equally reliable, though attractive throughout, also tips the scales toward this duo’s version of events, and both spend much of the play as essentially blameless characters.

This becomes a problem as more is revealed, and Brooke is already something of the Achilles heel of the piece. She is continually, incredibly shocked that a mother should worry about her daughter’s next reveal. When, in the second act, she is still perplexed that Polly hasn’t given her blessing, you wish she would continue with the program and we would continue with the show.

These are all relatively minor issues, however. Baitz’s play is firmly in the grand tradition of “family reunions from hell,” so if one domino doesn’t hit the next one with as much force, that’s okay; we know they will all end up overthrown. A decade and a half after its premiere, this revival makes a strong case for its ranking among the best of them, and makes a definitive case for its dissection of American rot—perhaps too strangely.

Written during the American withdrawal from Iraq and reflecting on the slow disillusionment unleashed by the Vietnam War, Other Desert Cities has history on its mind. Baitz could never have predicted Trump’s rise to power, which is why the play’s attacks on Reagan and celebrity-turned-politicians (the bread and butter of safe liberalism) are now chanted with calamitous prescience, even though they were created in the relative safety of Obama’s third year in office.

But the play takes place only a year after the Chicks’ musical career was rightfully derailed by anti-war comments, and it still carries the feeling of a current and potentially professionally damaging political missive that this country no longer dares take to its biggest stages.

Louis-Dreyfus and Janney built much of their legacies on television series with broadly appealing progressive leanings. Harris, the MVP in this regard, memorably sat by while the red-scared Elia Kazan received a standing ovation at the 1999 Oscars.

Other Desert Cities speaks to its bold position at the intersection of the culture and politics of that era, but revivals inevitably invite comparisons between the present and the past. The widespread negative reactions to the Vietnam and Iraq wars are similar in how the country’s artists responded to them with certainty and immediacy. No one has ever been in favor of this latest war against Iran, as many were during the Bush presidency. The question hanging over the theater today: will anyone put on a play about the war we are really fighting?