When the curtain rises on Jon Robin Baitz’s 2010 drama “Other Desert Cities,” we see a family in tableau. The actors are laughing and talking, but there’s something formal about the way the director John Benjamin Hickey has posed them in their huge California living room. They aren’t acknowledging the audience, which is applauding wildly, but they are clearly waiting for us to get accustomed to their presence.
Or, really, to her presence. Julia Louis-Dreyfus has returned to the stage for the first time since college, and it seems as though the intervening time — the years of “Seinfeld,” the years in “Veep” — was just the long windup of a catapult. Whammo! Louis-Dreyfus has crashed at last into Broadway.
Hollywood’s glare and what hides behind it is actually a theme in Baitz’s family drama, which doubles as a state-of-the-union allegory: It consists of vivid bickering in the first half and bitter revelations in the second. (Just like the U.S.A.!) Baitz sets his play in 2004, the year after the United States led a coalition into Iraq, so while the title refers to a sign on the highway near Palm Springs, it also calls to mind various hot places where American power has been grimly at play.
When we meet them, the Wyeth family — home for Christmas — has just been playing a merry game of mixed doubles. Louis-Dreyfus, wearing a navy tennis outfit that would pass military inspection, is the brusque Republican matriarch, Polly; Ed Harris is Lyman, her movie-star-turned-ambassador husband (deliciously, he’s still proud of his time as “spokesman for the California wine board”); and Joe Keery is Trip, their glossy TV producer son. Lily Rabe plays their defiantly liberal daughter, Brooke, finally visiting California again after a difficult six years — a time of writer’s block, a dud marriage and a mental breakdown. Her much-remarked-on lightness is an effort.
The family will, in a way, play mixed doubles for the rest of the show. Their net is the huge sand-brown couch center stage (Scott Pask designed the set); each family member fires fond insults across its massive expanse. The sometime line-judge, sometime spoiler in this long-running game is Polly’s dissipated sister, Silda (Allison Janney), who staggers onstage a scene-and-a-half late, technically sober but still sniffing other people’s booze. (If this setup seems familiar, “Other Desert Cities” is Baitz’s sun-dazzled reflection on Edward Albee’s “A Delicate Balance.”)
The dynamic is rapid-fire badinage: Polly was a writer when she first came to Hollywood, but now it’s her family’s script she wants to polish. She insists that things stay cheery. No lefty politics! No whining about past suicidality! Her old chum Nancy Reagan always told her to maintain control. “The only way to get someone to not be an invalid is to refuse to treat them as such,” Polly tuts. Silda calls that “the entire G.O.P. platform in a nutshell.”
Comedically, Louis-Dreyfus delivers the night’s overhead smashes; Janney plays long. Louis-Dreyfus in particular demonstrates how to serve a punchline. When she’s on, she’s a titanium joke machine. We laugh when the blithely racist Polly tells Brooke that her tennis clothes make her look like “a refugee from a library in Kabul,” not because it’s a funny phrase, but because Louis-Dreyfus gives a little improvisatory quaver to “library” (why a library?) and then doubles down with the inappropriateness of “Kabul.” (As is common in work like this, Baitz gives the best lines to the worst person.)
Brooke’s Christmas surprise is that she has written — and sold — a memoir about the first son of the Wyeths, her rarely-mentioned older brother, Henry. He’s the family’s lost black sheep: an antiwar radical implicated in a Weather Underground-style bombing, who couldn’t live with the accidental consequences. Brooke, rather naïvely, expects her parents’ blessing for this exhumation of the family’s secret, and her analysis of how they let Henry down, decades ago. But then every buried family explosive goes off at once.
Baitz gets a bit schematic as the plot moves onward (the long ending can feel like a sequence of dueling monologues), but the play is mostly an artfully knotted conundrum of disputed memory and stung feelings. It can also be read as a sly portrait of the Reagan-Bush era, in which conservatism was characterized as parental and responsible, while radicalism was the province of the young. Baitz describes the moneyed Hollywood Republicans as hypnotized by their own golden surfaces: “Acting or real?” Polly asks. “The two aren’t mutually exclusive in this family.”
That’s just a thin mustardy layer of politics, though, in this big ham sandwich: “Other Desert Cities” is primarily a showcase for actors, working in concert. Those of us who saw the Broadway version in 2011 with Stockard Channing and Judith Light and Stacy Keach will never forget it.
Janney is consistently and spectacularly droll, even though her character is underserved by the play; Keery, a real discovery, manages to be droll with a heart. Unfortunately, though, one performer insists on playing in a different key than the others, which yanks the whole ensemble out of tune. Rabe — fresh from playing Shakespeare in the Park outdoors — works in operatic broad strokes rather than in fine detail. Her fixed expressions turn glassy, and she speaks so portentously that she gives us enough time to register her character’s inconsistencies. (Brooke has written a book about her parents’ treatment of her brother, but she’s never asked them for so much as a photo? I don’t think so.)
Hickey often returns to the first moment’s strangely frontal, tableau-like staging. The Hudson stage is as wide as a football field; performers sometimes seem to be calling plays rather than chatting. Actors might face straight out to the audience, and once or twice characters hold a dramatic gesture as if they’re in a melodrama. It could be Hickey’s way of suggesting that we’re in a moral landscape (or a Macy’s window?) rather than a living room. Or perhaps the Hudson’s simply too big.
It’s certainly expensive. People may be ready to pay the eye-watering prices that are being charged for this production, which, to be clear, is a sometimes clever family drama, staged handsomely, but not brilliantly. Orchestra seats go for around $800, which, appallingly, isn’t the most Broadway charges these days. In the play, assigning a premium value to Hollywood stars like Lyman deranges our body politic. Celebrity worship’s not great for dynamic pricing either.
So I cannot say if it’s “worth” it to spend so much to see Louis-Dreyfus, but it is still grand to find her on Broadway. Her nervy charisma transfers nicely to the theater, where we can see her stumbles — her Polly is endearingly unsure about how to take her own husband’s arm — and her steely recoveries.
Louis-Dreyfus makes it clear how people can simultaneously love and fear Polly. Her backbone will go straight and her lips will cut left and she will chop whoever’s standing in front of her into kindling. She is tiptop at that kind of put-down, and we’ve seen her do it a hundred times onscreen. What feels like new magic is how in the next moment she can rivet the audience by suddenly seeming tiny and unsteady again. That is a trick that will surely serve her well in other roles, in other plays.
Other Desert Cities
Through Jan. 17 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; otherdesertcitiesbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
Discussion about this post