Other Desert Cities Has Dried Up and Blown Away

If for some reason you’d like to feel like it’s 2011 or even 2004 again (and pay $800 to do it!), Other Desert Cities is happy to oblige you. Back on Broadway 15 years after its premiere, plus another seven from when the bulk of its action is set, Jon Robin Baitz’s rich-family-with-secrets play is, in its current form, at best a trippy experience. More often, that mildly amusing sense of displacement (where am I? When am I? Look, it’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus!) curdles into something harder to swallow. The play strikes a pose of cultural commentary — even of heavyweight issue drama; it was Pulitzer-nominated in 2012 — but its essence is more daytime soap than scathing cri de coeur. Politics, as was still possible on plenty of stages a decade and a half ago, is the spice added to the deeply standard meat and potatoes of its structure. To continue the metaphor, if the play were a meal made by its central matriarch, Polly Wyeth — a caustic SoCal retiree who runs with Nancy Reagan and wants to know when everybody got “so damn sensitive about every last thing” — she’d probably present it with a wink and describe it as ethnic.

Or maybe she’d just call it “Chink food,” actual words dropped by the character so early on that we’ve hardly finished settling into our seats. Are we supposed to approve of them? Of course not, but that’s hardly the point. Baitz’s play trafficks in the kind of humor that we’ve finally started, in the past decade and a half, to point to for what it is: neoliberal pandering that makes ample space for the Pollys and Polly-sympathizers of the world to giggle safely in the dark while a frisson of “Oh, that’s naughty, but gosh, I too get so tired of political correctness” runs through the air. If we’re going to turn Broadway into a machine for letting people sit close to celebrities for an exorbitant fee, can’t we at least put those celebrities in plays that feel less dated? (Perhaps even new ones?) Like too many commercial productions, Other Desert Cities isn’t particularly interested in what theater can or might do other than shape itself around a certain group of famous people. Joining Louis-Dreyfus’s 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 her Elaine Stritch–ian, recently on-the-wagon sister, Silda; Lily Rabe as Polly and Lyman’s daughter, Brooke, a writer who struggles with depression; and Joe Keery (aka Djo and/or Steve from Stranger Things) as their son Trip, the peacekeeping, pleasure-oriented cynic to Brooke’s brooding, goading truth seeker.

That Polly and Lyman, who live in a house that looks like a Palm Springs Hilton, are “old-guard Republicans in Hollywood” and their Gen X daughter excoriates their politics generates enough material to push certain scenes along, but it’s not really the crux of Baitz’s play. That would be the old Memoir Threatens to Tell All device. After a long stint in a mental hospital and several more years in the Northeast with the freedom-hating liberal elites, Brooke has written a book that she has not only sold “to the first people who read it” but that will shortly be excerpted in The New Yorker. Brooke has arrived back at the family homestead in the California desert on Christmas Eve, bearing 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’s “not gonna be so easy” because the book “is about Henry. Whom we can’t talk about, it’s about our brother, who went to war with our parents, joined a cult, disappeared, and then planted a bomb in an army recruiting station, before killing himself — is what it’s actually about.”

At least, as convenient exposition goes, it’s honest. The psychic scar left by the Wyeths’ eldest boy — was he the perfect brother or a reckless drug addict or a brave antiwar radical? And why, Brooke agonizes, didn’t their parents try to help him before it was too late? — is what all this is actually about. Baitz’s title is meant to make us think, among other things, of Baghdad, where “so many people are dying in a desert, thousands of miles away,” Silda upbraids her sister, but we can’t really concentrate on something about which the play has so little formal curiosity. It’s as if we’re at a dinner party listening to dishy gossip and every so often the TV in the other room mumbles something about the morbid state of the world. Everyone will take a little dutiful pause to nod in agreement — yes, things are bad, but now tell us more about Henry. For a production in 2026, it’s also an extra-high hurdle to make us really care about the struggles of these very wealthy Bush supporters and their daughter who apparently had to spend all of five minutes shopping her trauma-inspired autofiction. John Benjamin Hickey’s play-it-as-it-lays revival more frequently chooses to pretend that the obstacle isn’t there.

As the author of that autofiction, Brooke is our true protagonist, the audience’s stand-in — she’s a writer who decamped to New York, so of course she is. But especially as Other Desert Cities progresses, there’s something queasy about how maimed her life has been, not by her parents but by her playwright. Pleading, and then essentially threatening, for information about her brother is the character’s main function. And while Baitz doesn’t provide literal ages, Brooke is hardly a kid: It’s 2004, and the war that drove a tragic wedge between her parents and her older brother was Vietnam. Presumably in her 40s, she’s been defined by a single trauma since she was a young teen, which isn’t so much unbelievable as it is uninteresting. As a character she’s too blocky and grim to be compelling; we ought to sympathize with her, but she doesn’t fire up our hearts. It’s a rough role, and Rabe seems actively uncomfortable in it. When she’s standing, her knees are almost always unnaturally bent, as if she’s trying to disguise her height. All she has to go on is bewilderment and pain, and that single note gets thin pretty quickly.

It’s no surprise that Other Desert Cities is headed toward a grand twist — theater of the 2010s loved domestic skirmish followed by a shattering eleventh-hour revelation — and to talk about the play in full, I’d 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 poke at it too much. Especially when it comes to poor Brooke. Her life — not to mention Trip’s life, though Keery is squirreled away at the back of the stage during the climax — is rewritten in the show’s last 15 minutes, as new trauma is sold to us as resolution of the old. It’s taken Brooke 30-odd years of writer’s block and suicidal ideation to wrestle with her experiences; it takes her 30 seconds of screamy monologue to move through crisis toward catharsis.

Everything I’m laying at Baitz’s door here belongs not just to Other Desert Cities but to a whole genre of modern American playwriting, one that lets its audiences feel like they’ve grappled with something serious while really encouraging their brains to relax into classic melodrama. The pleasures of such plays aren’t holistic — they come in flashes, like, for instance, a withering showpiece of a speech that Keery delivers with a touch of crazy-eye 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 — harder-edged, drier, claws more exposed — was the real fit for the part. But Janney’s so good at whatever she does, including throwing shade while swanning around in caftans, that I soon embraced her arch, not-so-secretly pitiful Silda. As for Polly, Louis-Dreyfus doesn’t terrify us in the part — and she and Rabe never quite seem to match up as mother and daughter — but she does fill it out with a different kind of potency. She’s not a Stockard Channing (who originated the role in the show’s premiere both off and on Broadway). She’s nicer than that, without Channing’s preternatural acerbity. There’s a natural screwball buoyancy to her that she’s mostly working to stiffen here but that does paint its own picture, one of the perfect homemaker who used to be a comedy screenwriter but gave it up so she could support her husband as he joined Ronnie’s cabinet. At the same time, Harris, closer in age to his part than the women, moves and sounds like the old cowboys, with an affecting note of sorrow — the lion dying, and dying with regrets — sounding throughout his performance. If only these actors could dedicate themselves to material more worthy of all our time. And if only their names, as talented as they are, weren’t so big a part of such an increasingly dispiriting game.

Other Desert Cities is at the Hudson Theatre.