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Theater review by Adam Feldman
Rating: Not recommended
Ticketing: Buy tickets here
“Families get terrorized by their weakest member,” observes Polly Wyeth, the tough and acidulous mother played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the uneven Broadway revival of Other Desert Cities. In most cases, of course, that family member isn’t literally a terrorist, but that’s just one of the ways in which the Wyeths are exceptional.
Polly and her husband, Lyman, played by Ed Harris, are wealthy former Hollywood insiders: He starred in B-level war films and westerns; she collaborated with her sister, Silda (Alison Janney), to write a series of Gidget-y teenager flicks. Thanks in part to their friendship with the Reagans—Nancy was “like a big sister to me,” Polly says—they have transitioned into prominent members of California’s Republican establishment, despite one terrible personal scandal: In in the early 1970s, their 20-year-old son, Henry, got mixed up with a radical antiwar group that bombed a recruitment center, killing a man. They rarely speak of Henry now, in 2004. But when their daughter, Brooke (Lily Rabe), reveals that she has written a memoir about her late brother, silence may no longer be enough.
Jon Robin Baitz’s 2011 family drama was a hit at Lincoln Center before transferring to Broadway, and its critique of the recent Bush administration has an Upper West Side sensibility; it largely assumes that its audience shares a Democratic viewpoint that thus needs little articulation. (David Cote’s review in Time Out decried its “liberal smugness and subscriber-pandering glibness.”) The passage of 15 years gives some of the play’s current Broadway revival, directed by John Benjamin Hickey, an odd dramatic irony. When Silda lays into Polly and Lymon about “the zealots who have taken over your party and marinated it in intolerance”—“You guys let it happen. You are incapable of speaking out, even while finding fault with it in private”—the indictment seems prescient but also almost quaint, now that RINOs like the Wyeths have been hunted nearly to extinction within the MAGA-morphed GOP.
In any case, Other Desert Cities keeps the political firmly in its place behind the personal. Sparks are meant to fly as this divided family—which also includes youngest sibling Trip (Joe Keery)—finally confronts secrets and lies that have burned underground for decades, waiting to erupt. But the fire in the hearth of Scott Pask’s elegant set provides more real heat than most of the production.
Louis-Dreyfus has done little stage work, and her inexperience sometimes shows. She looks great in Tom Broecker's costumes—including a full-length knitted sheath dress that matches one of the chairs—on point in Polly’s cutting comedy, the waspishness of a WASP-y Jewish girl. Her whole face sharpens with intent. “Sarcasm is the purview of teenagers and homosexuals,” Polly quips early on; she favors sarcasm’s uptown cousin, sardonicism. Louis-Dreyfus excels at that, but seems tentative in the play’s more dramatic second act; she struggles to maintain power onstage, especially when she isn’t speaking. More surprising is that Janney, an accomplished theater actor, is such a shrug in the juicy part for which Judith Light won a Tony Award. The bitter, alcoholic Silda should have moral and intellectual heft, at least at first; instead she comes across as a weightless burnout, a flake of ash. (When the lighting zeroes in on her at the end of Act I, the attention feels puzzling.)
Rabe has a different problem. Brooke is the kind of self-serious pill who says things like ““I am suddenly so tired of the indentured servitude of having a family” and “I am as sorry I am a writer as you are. I wish I had been made differently.” (“You shunned him,” she tells her parents, regarding Henry. “And with that, you have to live.”) It’s already a thankless role—made even more unsympathetic without dragon ladies at either side of it—and Rabe’s high-intensity acting pushes too hard; only in the final ten minutes or so does her performance really click into place.
The men fare better. Harris is superb as Lyman, a craggily handsome Clint Eastwood type who tends toward the laconic—Polly is happy to do most of the talking—but who, when he does speak, does so with decency and feeling; Keery keeps a smooth balance on a precarious fence between Trip’s parents on one side and his sister and aunt on the other. And both men nail their big comic moments: Harris in an extended fake death, Keery in pouring out confessions while rolling a joint.
Although Other Desert Cities is imperfect, it might still be mildly recommendable—who wouldn’t want to see Julia Louis-Dreyfus in person?—if it were not so wildly expensive. To see this Saturday’s 8pm performance, a seat in the front row—where you’ll be closest to the celebrities—would cost you $1,342.88, including a “service fee” of $143.88 for ordering online; a seat at the very back of the balcony would set you back a mere $446.88. Those rates are the result of dynamic pricing, so they reflect what the market will bear, and I’m sure there’s some trickle-down theory about how that helps the industry. But if you ask me, anyone willing to pay that much for a basically middling production will be getting what they deserve.
Other Desert Cities. Hudson Theatre (Broadway). By Jon Robin Baitz. Directed by John Benjamin Hickey. With Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Harris, Lily Rabe, Allison Janney, Joe Keery. Running time: 2hrs 30mins. One intermission.
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