[title]
A family reunion; a prodigal daughter; a sour, one-liner spewing mother; intergenerational strife; shocking family secrets; lots of drinking; lots of rich Americans worrying about rich American stuff.
Jon Robin Baitz’s ‘Other Desert Cities’ sounds familiar – that synopsis could equally be applied to ‘August: Osage County’, or last year’s ‘Disgraced’, or seemingly most things that get nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
But the fact is that lots of these plays are very good, and while the privilege of Baitz‘s protagonists can occasionally grate, ‘Other Desert Cities’ is the best thing I’ve seen at the Old Vic in yonks.
Headline attraction in director Lindsay Posner’s cast is American actor Martha Plimpton. She is superb as Brooke, the lefty writer daughter of the staunchly Republican Wyeth clan. Returning to her parents’ Palm Springs pad for Christmas in the desert, Brooke ruins the holidays pretty comprehensively by announcing plans to publish a warts-and-all family memoir. Plimpton is loud, vulnerable, effortlessly likeable and troublingly ambivalent, forever restating the reasons why she is publishing the memoir without ever sounding convinced: because she owes it to herself; because it’ll end her writer’s block; because it’s what kept her going after her breakdown; because the world should know that her parents drove her brother Henry to join a cult and kill himself. The underlying, half-voiced suggestion is that she had pathetically hoped her poisonous mother Polly (Sinéad Cusack) and kindly, patrician father Lyman (Peter Egan) would somehow approve.
The rest of the cast, all British and Irish, are also excellent, particularly Cusack, who dispenses cruel barbs like harpoons, but maintains real gravitas, credible as a humble Jewish girl who reinvented herself as a formidable Wasp through sheer bludgeoning force of will.
‘Other Desert Cities’ is a skilfully blended cocktail of fear, anger, unvoiced grievances and sassy putdowns, magnified by the Old Vic’s current, greatly improved in-the-round configuration. But the key ingredient is love – neither Baitz nor Posner, nor cast allows us to forget how desperately the five people on stage – Brooke, her parents, her brother Trip (Daniel Lapaine) and her aunt Silda (Claire Higgins) – care about each other. Sometimes it’s a relief, sometimes it’s too painful to bear. And it’s the explosive legacy of this love that delivers the play’s killer final revelations. Sometimes you long for the working-class earthiness of O’Neill or Miller, but this is a Big American Play of the first order.