Other Desert Cities
Much of the critical response to Baitz' new play, which is now running at the Booth Theater on Broadway under the direction of Joe Mantello, is a sort of "it's about time"--this is the major play that puts Baitz in the big time. And indeed, Other Desert Cities is a spectacular work, plumbing the depths of not only the dynamics of a certain kind of American family, but also resonating with anyone who has ever winced at some wrong-headed statement (or Facebook posting) made by a family member about politics.
"Families get terrorized by their weakest member," says Polly Wyeth (Stockard Channing), and this play proves it so, although who is the weakest member? Polly wouldn't say herself. She and her husband, Lyman (Stacey Keach), are old guard Hollywood, modeling themselves after the Reagans. He was an actor, later a politician, while she was a screenwriter who became a steely politician's wife. Lyman says of her, "She's the only woman to have faced down Nancy Reagan, Betsy Bloomingdale, and Mrs. Annenberg at the same lunch and reduced them all to tears."
The time is 2004, Christmas Eve. The setting is the Wyeth's home in Palm Springs, California. The Wyeth's adult children are visiting. They are Trip (Justin Kirk), a seemingly-happy-go-lucky TV producer. He makes a hit reality show that uses washed up stars as jury members for real trials. Given his upbringing, he's slumming, but he says, "People need to laugh today. It's all so serious and goddamn, you know, horrible out there. We could all get anthraxed any minute--people need a laugh!"
Then there's Brooke (Rachel Griffiths), his older sister. She's a writer, living in Sag Harbor. Her parents wished she lived closer, and mention that the house next door is for sale. "I think living on the East Coast has given you the impression that sarcasm is alluring and charming. It is not. Sarcasm is the purview of teenagers and homosexuals," says Polly.
Despite good-natured bickering about culture, "It's all or nothing with your generation. Either vegans or meth addicts or both at the same time," and politics--the war in Iraq is a subject to be avoided, things are cheerful. Brooke has a new book, Trip's show is going well, and Polly's sister, Silda (Judith Light) is drying out after falling off the wagon. She was Polly's former writing partner, and a kind of larger than life character, who enters a room and proclaims, "You know what happens when you don't drink? You dream. I hate dreams. I have more Nazi dreams than Elie Wiesel. What does that say about, always being chased by the SS?"
There's also good news that Brooke, who had written one novel, has finished and sold her second book. This is big stuff, considering that a few years earlier she had a nervous breakdown. But the big first act plot point is that the book is a memoir. It seems that she had an older brother, who during the Vietnam War ran with a radical group that planted a bomb at a recruiting station, killing someone. He later committed suicide, and that has haunted her ever since. She blames her parents for pushing him away in his time of need.
The remainder of the play is the back and forth as Polly is outraged by this. Lyman, at first, prefers to stay out of the fray, but later, when he learns that in just a few months an excerpt will appear in The New Yorker, implores his daughter to wait until they are dead to publish. A big reveal will occur in the second act which changes the color of everything, including what Brooke had thought of her parents all these years.
Other Desert Cities has a lot of balls in the air. Baitz, who I assume is a liberal, doesn't disguise his contempt for the kind of Republican that the Wyeths are--Nancy Reagan is a kind of Satanic presence in the play. Brooke had assumed that because her brother Henry's radicalism reflected badly on her parents' standing in the Republican community, they spurned his efforts to get help. Silda, an old-fashioned liberal, who helped Brooke right the book, much to Polly's horror, agrees with that view: "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. And you live in that complicity every day. A war in which so many people are dying in the desert, thousands of miles away. Because it's a war declared by a man whose father is someone with whom you occasionally dine, you keep silent. That is what true believers do. That, that's what your daughter has written."
Other Desert Cities is a wonderful play, and it surprised me in a few ways. I found the characters sharply drawn, but at times they said things that don't conform to what we might expect. Polly is so tough that she is willing to sever contact with Brooke over this. Channing, a marvelous stage presence, invests her role with so much resolve that one can't help feel a little frightened of her. Keach's performance is the leveler, an oak of a man, firm in conviction, but softer than this wife, but even he is not ready to forgive his daughter for a breach of trust.
At times the play falls into typical dramaturgical problems. Since the characters all know the past, exposition becomes clumsy, especially when the audience must be ladled information about Henry. I also struggled with the ages of the actors. When I learned that Henry's incident took place during the Vietnam War (at first I thought it must be during the Iraq War), I had to adjust--clearly Brooke must be in her mid-40s, while Trip is much younger (indeed, the script says he is ten years younger), though Griffiths and Kirk are roughly the same age--it isn't often that an actress will hear she looks too young for the part.
Griffiths has a tough part to play. She's pretty much a pill--she clings to her book, even after her parents' protest (I would never write about my parents while they were alive). But Griffiths also makes it plain that this death is the dominant feature in her psyche, and that she must address it, come what may. Kirk plays a character much like his role of Andy on Weeds--a sybarite and something of comic relief, though he has a speech that lays out his hidden pain.
As I thought about the play later it occurred to me that Mantello has divided the stage in twain. For most of the action, Polly and Lyman stay stage left, while Brooke, Trip, and Silda remain stage right. Of course, to the audience, this is reversed--the leftists are to our left, while the conservatives are to our right. Not only is there a political schism, but also a family schism. When Trip is asked whether he supports Brooke or not, he is in his parents' domain, but he takes a centrist view, and thus retreats upstage, in the direct center of the set.
The other major character, as the title may suggest, is the desert. Palm Springs is an enclave that the Wyeth's are hiding in--Trip points out that they don't even get to L.A. much. It's a place where one can get lost staring out the window at the desert, perhaps secure in being protected from the world at large, both by geographic isolation and the knowledge that there probably isn't a Democrat for miles. An accidental death has the ring of stature--a woman is run over by a garbage truck, but on Bob Hope Drive. But, as Silda says, "Palm Springs isn't a refuge, it's King Tut's Tomb.The whole town is filled with mummies with tans."
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