What if there was a second Ronald Reagan? It is a troubling and deeply resonant question, and one originally posed by playwright Jon Robin Baitz in his 2011 Pulitzer Prize-finalist play, Other Desert Cities. A classic coming-home family drama, the production was last seen on Broadway that very same year, when its intense study of neoconservative order running headlong into its rotten, self-serving legacy was burning with hot-button relevance. Set largely in 2004, the play opens with anxious talk of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan before settling into its more allegorical narrative. It follows the troubled liberal daughter of prominent Palm Springs Republicans who returns to the family nest bearing the worst kind of holiday gift: manuscripts of a damning, soon-to-be-published family memoir.
The Wyeth family—matriarch Polly, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus in her official Broadway debut, and patriarch Lyman, played by Ed Harris—stand as grand poobahs of the conservative establishment. In their heyday, they were close friends of the Reagans and other figures of that political era, with Barry Goldwater even receiving a mention in the script. Lyman, much like "dear old Dutch," enjoyed a career as a low-tier movie star before President Reagan rewarded his loyalty with a prestigious ambassadorship. Polly, unlike Nancy Reagan, is Jewish and previously wrote a forgettable series of made-for-TV movies alongside her sister before a higher purpose—and significantly more money—came calling. Now retired from the glittering lights of showbiz and the high-stakes world of politics, the Wyeths comfortably enjoy their country club socializing and their well-appointed mid-century Palm Springs home, though they do not always relish the company of their adult children.
Among the younger generation is baby boy Trip, played by Joe Keery, the caddish and porn-addicted creator of a People’s Court-esque reality television show titled Jury of Your Peers. The central joke of Trip’s program is that the titular jury is composed entirely of faded pop-culture icons and D-list celebrities. Though hardly the pride and joy of his parents, Trip remains close to them in the peculiarly infantilized way of youngest children, remaining far more apathetic to their increasingly creaky and potentially dangerous politics than his sister, Brooke. Portrayed by Lily Rabe, Brooke is the black sheep of the family who long ago decamped for the East Coast, where a marriage subsequently crumbled and she spent months recovering in a psychiatric hospital.
The American cultural and political moment in which Brooke and her parents find themselves—just in the wake of George W. Bush’s second presidential election victory—presents a fraught landscape for such deep ideological divides within a single household. The respective political sides are pushed further and further apart as the nation seemingly dumbs itself down with modern media and tilts precariously toward what could become another Vietnam. Yet, more poignantly ailing the Wyeth family is the lingering ghost of Polly and Lyman’s eldest son, Henry. He dropped out and burnt out before ultimately taking his own life following a Weather Underground-esque bombing incident that tragically killed a security guard at an Army recruitment facility.
That devastating event occurred 30 years in the past, which is precisely where the family has largely kept that suffocating pain locked away—until Brooke makes the abrupt announcement that she has written the book that will till the earth of their family tragedy for all the world to see. A horrified set of parents instantly turns on their addled daughter, with an aimless and amoral son caught helplessly in the middle of the crossfire.
Minus these specific period details, this is a remarkably familiar set-up in the American theater; anyone weaned on the medium is well and perhaps fondly aware of the squabbling, big-gesture, family-secret genre. Audiences recently saw this dynamic in sterling form on Broadway in two awards-bedecked plays from the same overarching theatrical lineage: Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’ companion-piece barn burners Appropriate and Purpose. It is a hoary but still fecund dramatic form, prompting the observation that almost every great playwright worth their salt must eventually feature their own version of a juicy living-room brawl in their portfolio.
When it first debuted, Other Desert Cities—with a title referring to a literal highway sign on the approach to Palm Springs, but perhaps also alluding to places in faraway countries being bombed and invaded at the time of the story—was hailed as one of the greats of its kind. Theatergoers basking in the elated and relieved first blushes of the Obama administration were deeply hungry for plays that looked back at the terrible destruction and numbskullery of the Bush years, eager to sift through the rubble and find some piercing insight that might put all that political horror into its proper historical context. There was also a palpable desire to laugh, now that political dinosaurs like Polly and Lyman had seemingly been proven so terribly wrong by history.
Audiences who saw the play back then were routinely rattled, moved, and amused by its sharp construction. It was a singular pleasure to watch Stockard Channing inhabit Polly as the dark inverse of her solid-liberal first lady character on The West Wing; to sit in the rumbling majesty of Stacy Keach as a grizzly old teddy bear of a Lyman; and to enjoy Judith Light wryly staggering around the stage as Polly’s tenuously sober sister, Silda, a role played in this current revival by Allison Janney. The cri de coeur of Baitz’s writing made an undeniable impact as well, presenting a portrait of wealthy and once-powerful right-wingers stranded on the wrong side of history that felt like a smug and bitterly sad goodbye to an era—to an entire political ethos over which the country had supposedly just triumphed.
In hindsight, of course, that was an awfully presumptuous sentiment. Baitz could in no way have predicted what would come belching out of the political underworld in the wake of Obama-era optimism, which unfortunately makes much of Other Desert Cities read today like an ossified, naive period piece. And yet, there is still some pertinence to be mined from the text; plenty of contemporary liberal children are currently railing against the cold self-dealing of their wealthy, Trump-voting parents. At least, that is likely the contemporary value that the producers of this new staging at the Hudson Theatre saw in the material.
In order to successfully sell this political-meets-personal drama in the present day, a starry cast was required, and one has indeed been impressively assembled. The A-list ensemble has immediately made Other Desert Cities one of the hottest tickets of the fall theater season, with opening-night audiences regularly stacked with notable celebrities cheering on their peers or observing from the stalls.
Unfortunately, those looking for a masterclass in ensemble balance were left wanting. This iteration of Other Desert Cities, directed by John Benjamin Hickey, feels wobbly from the start, off-rhythm, and woefully imbalanced in its performances. The biggest draw of the production is undoubtedly Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a television comedy icon who has earned 11 Emmy Awards and a Mark Twain Prize. Sharp, nimble, and entirely unafraid of humor’s dark corners, Louis-Dreyfus is a legend for good reason. She has also proved herself to be an adept dramatic actress in Nicole Holofcener’s feature films Enough Said and You Hurt My Feelings, performances that arguably deserved far more awards recognition than they received. It is precisely because Louis-Dreyfus is so universally admired in the filmed arts that it comes as such a profound disappointment to report her performance simply does not click here.
Louis-Dreyfus leans far too hard on the sitcom-esque beats of Baitz’s early banter, which sets her up poorly for the towering dramatic demands to come in the later acts. In the text, Polly is spoken of as the undisputed lion of the household, a force of nature who ruthlessly commands her family whether she is wearing a cute tennis skirt or a boho maxi dress on an outing to Saks. Louis-Dreyfus, however, communicates little of that underlying power; she remains too airy and chipper throughout, never truly giving the audience the sense that Polly is firmly planted in the hard bedrock of her conservative world.
While Louis-Dreyfus deftly manages to land a few killer lines and achingly registers some of the sadder stretches of the script, Channing’s moody gravitas is sorely missed, especially during Polly’s flashes of genuine anger. A pinched and peppery delivery worked brilliantly for Louis-Dreyfus on the political satire Veep, but Polly’s rage is meant to be a deeper, more elemental threat, one amassed carefully to conceal an ocean of pain and personal regret. The audience picks up very little of that layered complexity in this interpretation.
Ed Harris, on the night he was observed, seemed adrift, struggling to find the musicality in Lyman’s dramatic shift from a supportive father to a titan indignantly defending his master-of-the-universe life choices. There were sudden, uncomfortable breaks in tempo that suggested an actor grasping for the next measure of dialogue. Perhaps attempting to compensate for Louis-Dreyfus’s flimsiness and Harris’s willowy stage presence, Lily Rabe turns the melodrama knob up far too high, churning the play’s second act into a sometimes illegible howl of sheer despair. Allison Janney, typically such a smooth professional on stage, tries valiantly to keep things grounded and in motion, but ultimately cannot find her proper footing within this out-of-sync ensemble.
The standout acting of the evening belongs to Stranger Things star Joe Keery, who credibly embodies a young man whose privilege and access have certainly made him deeply cynical, but not yet entirely devoid of decency. He is simply the spoiled, listless baby of a family whom he is too young to have known at their mightiest, prior to their postlapsarian retreat to the desert with a buried family tragedy in tow. Keery brilliantly nails the specific way that young men of a certain social stripe tend to pivot fluidly between snark and sensitivity, punctuating real feelings with a well-timed joke or a nihilistic provocation. He fundamentally understands the intended tone of Baitz’s rickety dynasty—the clan’s haughty but not entirely confident put-on that through all of this trials, they—like a noble idea of old America itself—shall somehow endure.
Keery’s best moment arrives at the very start of the second act, when he fizzily delivers a biting monologue detailing the banalities and anxieties of his daily existence. One naturally hopes that this welcome clarity and energy would sustain through the rest of the evening, but director Hickey all too soon lets the dramatic tension sag once again.
The entire back half of Other Desert Cities is structurally meant to build toward a grand reveal that bares a stark, uncomfortable truth regarding the Wyeths’ hypocrisy—focusing on the parents’ ultimate failure to live out their public principles in private life, or vice versa. That intended dramatic shock is severely dampened by Hickey’s enervating pacing; there is nothing steady about the build of the narrative here, with the line graph of the production instead tracing a series of jarring, sudden lurches.
Only the lovely writing at the very closing moments of the play—when a single character bathed in a pool of light reflects, years later, on what all of these shattering events ultimately led to—delivers a genuine swell of heady emotion. Just about everything else in this expensively populated theatrical venture feels arid, overheated, and woefully devoid of theatrical life.
Venue: Hudson Theatre, New York
Producers: Bad Robot Live, ATG Productions, Gavin Kalin Productions
Cast: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Lily Rabe, Joe Keery
Director: John Benjamin Hickey
Writer: Jon Robin Baitz
Costumes: Tom Broecker
Set: Scott Pask
Lighting: Natasha Katz
Casting: Jim Carnahan
Run time: 2 hours and 30 minutes (with intermission)