Other Desert Cities

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If Other Desert Cities has one silver lining, it’s the play’s uncanny ability to attract the type of star power that blinds audiences to a mundane narrative. For its Broadway debut fifteen years ago, Jon Robin Baitz’s mix of leaden one-liners and soapy seriousness enticed a talented cast that included Stockard Channing and Judith Light. It was a rewarding seduction: critical and commercial success led to a handful of Tony Award nominations, with a nod for Channing and a win for Light. Thanks to this outsized success, we are now beset by director John Benjamin Hickey’s revival, which strands us with a new set of popular faces, each undoubtedly hoping that a similar oasis of acclaim will emerge from the same dry dramatic well.

As hidebound California matriarch Polly Wyeth, Broadway novice Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Seinfeld, Veep) dutifully stirs the familial pot with a huge sitcomish spoon. The meager stew contains her character’s stolid Republican husband, Lyman (Ed Harris); liberal, middle-aged daughter, Brooke (Lily Rabe); insouciant, thirty-something son, Trip (Joe Keery); and irksome, shiftless sister, Silda (Allison Janney). Polly’s tired jibes (“Sarcasm is the purview of teenagers and homosexuals”) keep the concoction simmering until everything finally hits a roiling boil after the revelation of two long-buried secrets that mercifully signal to the actors that they can soon go home. One of these shameful truths upends the play with contrived heavy seasoning, while the other offers Janney a late opportunity to shock the audience—not through anything story-related, but by how much Hickey undercuts her performance.

Fresh out of rehab, the disheveled Silda sleeps late, reflexively takes left-wing potshots at Polly, and delights in ridiculing the gargantuan Christmas decorations in the family’s Palm Springs living room, which are meant to obscure even the faintest hint of Jewish heritage. Polly and Silda’s current relationship is a far cry from the sisters’ shared Hollywood youth co-writing Gidget-style films. That was long before Polly converted to Goldwaterism, Lyman morphed from a B-movie actor into a Reagan-era ambassador, or Silda became a snippy, interminable houseguest, angry at Polly for cocooning herself among the callously elite—like good friends Ron and Nancy—to avoid penance for old sins. But the holier-than-thou Silda herself proves an unreliable moral arbiter, a predictable outcome that Hickey has Janney emote, bizarrely, with her back to the audience.

Several years ago, Hickey helmed a glitzy revival of Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite with considerably more poise, perhaps because that comedic triptych had a playwright who knew how to blend dark relational dysfunction effortlessly into frothier fare. By contrast, Other Desert Cities is written as a relentless stop-and-go of intended laughter and furrowed brows. Taking place on Christmas Eve 2004, the play attempts to laboriously squeeze decades of divisive American history into the Wyeths’ beige abode, decorated with bland upscale restraint by scenic designer Scott Pask. Unwittingly, this physical environment mirrors the play’s underwhelming pivot toward the past.

It’s a well-heeled look back in anger that manifests as a literary sucker punch from Brooke, a novelist attempting to overcome seven years of debilitating depression through a switch to creative nonfiction. As a penultimate therapeutic step, the Long Island-based Brooke has toted her about-to-be-published memoir to Palm Springs for the holidays, detailing the origins of her mental health struggles. In a surreptitiously Silda-aided nutshell, she blames Polly and Lyman’s unyielding selfishness for fomenting her beloved big brother Henry’s naïve descent into cultish radicalism in the 1970s. More devastatingly, Brooke simultaneously holds her parents responsible for Henry’s guilt-ridden suicide after the deadly bombing of an army recruiting station. Unshakeable in her conclusions, Brooke professes a yuletide desire for complete honesty, as long as it’s a wholly vengeful version of events that will renew media attention on the mostly forgotten tragedy and publicly crush her parents. Merry Christmas, Mom and Dad!

The play wants to continually rebalance audience feelings, but Rabe’s slash-and-burn performance isn’t calibrated for eliciting sympathy, even if Brooke deserves it. Polly and Lyman might be out-of-touch, old-guard, materialistic grandees who unquestioningly support the Bush administration’s War on Terror, but they still lost a son. Rabe’s Brooke can’t set aside her own hurt to see theirs. She also has a cloying fixation on remaining the apple of her father’s eye while pitilessly refusing Lyman’s plea to wait to publish the tell-all until after he dies. During his character’s pained interactions with Brooke and others in the household, Harris acts as if the grim reaper already has a hand on his shoulder, ironically springing to life only when briefly reenacting Lyman’s amusing knack for falling down dead during the shootouts in his long-forgotten movies.

Other Desert Cities could use its own decent exit, which one of its privileged few almost provides. As the likable Trip, a reality TV producer exhausted by his family’s self-serving back-and-forth, Keery nails the play’s real divide: between having the time and money to wallow in the past and not. Unfortunately, after Trip disgustedly retreats from the play to take a seat upstage in lighting designer Natasha Katz’s purgatorial shadows, the worst is still to come for those who remain, especially the audience.

Other Desert Cities (through January 17, 2027)

The Hudson Theatre, 141 West 44th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, call 888-811-5040 or visit http://www.otherdesertcitiesbroadway.com

Running time: two hours and 30 minutes including one intermission