What if there was a second Ronald Reagan? It’s a troubling question that playwright Jon Robin Baitz asked in his 2011 Pulitzer finalist play. Other Desert Cities. A classic homecoming family drama, Other Desert Cities was on Broadway the same year when his study of the neoconservative order rushing headlong into its rotten, self-serving legacy was current. The play, set largely in 2004, opens with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, before settling into the more allegorical story of the struggling liberal daughter of Palm Springs Republicans who returns to the nest with the worst kind of Christmas present under her arm: the manuscripts of a damning family memoir soon to be published.
The Wyeths, Polly (Julia Louis-Dreyfus in her Broadway debut) and Lyman (Ed Harris), are conservative establishment poopers, once close friends with the Reagans and other wretches (Barry Goldwater is mentioned). Lyman, like dear old Dutchman, was a low-level movie star before Reagan gave him the ambassadorship. Polly, unlike Nancy, is Jewish and wrote an unforgettable series of TV movies with her sister before a higher purpose and more money called. Retired from showbiz and politics, the Wyeths enjoy their country club for socializing and their well-appointed midcentury home but, it seems, not always the company of their children.
Baby Boy Trip (Joe Keery) is the caddish creator and porn addict of a People’s Court-a reality TV show called Jury of your peersthe gag being that the jury is made up of faded icons and D-listers. Although he’s not very proud of his parents, Trip is close to them in the infantilized way that younger children are, and is much more apathetic about their increasingly fractious (and dangerous) politics than is his sister Brooke (Lily Rabe), a black sheep who long ago decamped to the East Coast, where a marriage collapsed and a few months were spent in a mental hospital.
The American moment Brooke and her parents find themselves in — just after George W. Bush’s second election victory — is fraught with ideological divisions within a family, with respective sides drifting further apart as the nation numbs itself to modern media and tilts toward what could become another Vietnam. But the Wyeths suffer perhaps most poignantly from the ghost of Polly and Lyman’s eldest son, Henry, who dropped out of college and burned out before committing suicide following a Weather Underground-style bombing that killed a security guard at an army recruiting center.
It’s 30 years in the past, however, and that’s where the family has largely held onto this pain, until Brooke announces that she has written the book that will plow the soil of their tragedy for all to see. Horrified parents lash out at their confused daughter in this way, with an aimless, amoral son caught in the middle.
Without the specific details, this is a familiar setup in the American theater; anyone weaned on the medium is well (and perhaps affectionately) aware of the genre of quarrels, grand gestures and family secrets. We just saw him in exceptional form on Broadway recently, in two award-winning plays by the same playwright: Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’ Barnburners. Appropriate And Aim. It’s an old but still fruitful form – I’m tempted to argue that almost every great playwright worth his salt must have some version of a juicy drawing room brawl in his portfolio.
When he debuted, Other Desert Cities – the title referring to a sign on the highway approaching Palm Springs, but perhaps also to locations in distant countries that were being bombed and invaded at the time of the story – has been hailed as one of the greatest of its kind. Audiences in the elated, relieved early days of the Obama era were hungry for plays that looked back on the terrible destruction and numbness of the Bush years, eager to sift through the rubble and find a piercing insight that could put all that horror in its proper context. And for laughs too, now that dinosaurs like Polly and Lyman were terribly wrong.
I saw the play at the time and was shaken, moved and amused by it, as were so many others. It was a pleasure watching Stockard Channing as Polly, playing the dark opposite of her staunch liberal first lady character in The west wing; sitting in the snarling majesty of Stacy Keach as old teddy bear Lyman; to enjoy Judith Light wryly staggering into the role of Silda, the shyly sober sister of Polly (played in this production by Allison Janney). And the cry of the heart Baitz’s writings also had an impact: his portrait of wealthy and once-powerful right-wingers stuck on the wrong side of history felt like a smug and bitterly sad farewell to an era, to an entire philosophy, over which we had just triumphed.
In hindsight, of course, it was a terribly presumptuous sentiment. There’s no way Baitz could have predicted what hell would emerge in the wake of Obama’s much-ballyhooed optimism. Other Desert Cities feels like an ossified and naive period piece. And yet, there is still some relevance to be exploited; Many liberal children are currently rebelling against the cold dealings of their wealthy Trump-voting parents. At least that’s the value that the producers of this new Hudson Theater production saw in the text.
In order to really sell this political and personal drama in this day and age, they would need an all-star cast, and this has indeed been assembled impressively. The A-list ensemble did Other Desert Cities one of the most popular tickets of the fall season; as proof, my audience was full of celebrities, there to encourage their peers or to simmer with envy about their success.
The latter camp, however, did not have much reason to sulk. This Other Desert Citiesdirected by John Benjamin Hickey, is shaky from the start, off-kilter and woefully unbalanced in its performances. The biggest draw here is undoubtedly Louis-Dreyfus, a TV comedy icon who has won 11 Emmy Awards and a Mark Twain Award. Sharp, agile and unafraid of the dark corners of humor, Louis-Dreyfus is a legend for good reason. She also proved to be an expert dramatic actress in two Nicole Holofcener films, Enough said And You hurt meperformances that should have been much more acclaimed than they were. I don’t know anyone who loves the film arts who doesn’t also love Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Which is why it’s a shame to report that she really doesn’t work here.
Louis-Dreyfus leans too heavily on the sitcom beats of Baitz’s early jokes, which poorly prepares her for the imposing drama to come. Polly is considered the lion of the house, a force of nature who ruthlessly commands her family in a cute tennis skirt or a bohemian, Saks-outing maxi dress. Louis-Dreyfus, however, communicates little of this power; she’s too airy and unbridled, never giving us the sense that Polly is firmly anchored in the foundation of her world.
While Louis-Dreyfus deftly lands some killer lines and painfully saves some of the sadder stretches, we sorely miss Channing’s brooding gravitas, especially when Polly gets angry. Pinch and pepper worked very well for Louis-Dreyfus on VIPbut Polly’s rage is meant to be a deeper, more elemental threat, built up to hide an ocean of pain and regret. We capture little of this layered complexity in this performance.
Harris, at least the night I saw him, seems lost, failing to find the music in Lyman’s shift from supportive father to titan indignantly defending his life choices as master of the universe. I wondered if Harris was perhaps taking his lines a little higher; there were sudden breaks in tempo that suggested an actor impatient to move on to the next measure. Perhaps to compensate for Louis-Dreyfus’s fragility and Harris’s slender presence, Rabe turns the melodrama knob too high, turning the play’s second act into a sometimes unreadable howl of despair. Janney, such a fluid pro on stage, tries to keep things grounded and moving, but can’t quite find her place in this out-of-sync ensemble.
The best acting is done by Stranger Things star Keery, who believably plays a young man whose privilege and access have certainly made him cynical, but not yet entirely indecent. He is simply the spoiled, apathetic baby of a family he is too young to have known in its heyday, before the postlapsarian retreat into the desert, his child buried at his side. Keery shows how men of a certain type tend to oscillate between snark and sensitivity, punctuating true feelings with a joke or nihilistic provocation. He understands the tone intended by the rickety Baitz dynasty, the clan’s haughty but not entirely confident attitude that even this they – like a noble idea of old America itself – will endure.
Keery’s best moment comes at the start of act two, when he effervescently delivers a biting monologue about the banalities and anxieties of his existence. One hopes that this welcome clarity and energy will continue throughout the rest of the piece, but Hickey lets the tension drop too soon.
The entire back half of Other Desert Cities is supposed to culminate in a big reveal that reveals a harsh truth about the Wyeths’ hypocrisy, about the parents’ inability to live public principles in private, or vice versa. This shock is severely dampened by Hickey’s unnerving pace; there is nothing stable about the construction here, the linear graph of production rather one of sudden lurches.
Only the beautiful writing at the very end of the play – when a character in a pool of light reflects, years later, on what it all led to – delivers a wave of intoxicating emotion. Almost everything else in this densely populated place is barren, overheated, and woefully devoid of life.
Location: Hudson Theater, New…
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