It’s hard to imagine any secrets or hints of repressed trauma long surviving in the sunny glare of Palm Springs, which keeps things bright in the airy, open-floor, big-window home of the moneyed family at the center of John Robin Baitz. Other desert cities, But those secrets live on, at least as long as they don’t.
Director John Benjamin Hickey’s revival of this utterly captivating play in a production opening tonight at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus (in her Broadway debut), Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Joe Keery and Lily Rabe, is a must-see, but the bold names aren’t the only things that make it worth it. other desert cities‘Hot ticket status. Although, in tone and performance, it may feel radically different from the acclaimed original production of 2011 – comparisons will undoubtedly be made, and not always to the benefit of the new take – Betz’s play feels just as vital in today’s bitterly divisive political and social climate.
Don’t let that description indicate a stuffy, joyless evening at the theater – as if anything involving the extremely charming Louis-Dreyfus could ever be joyless. seinfeld And Veep Starr brings an inexhaustible supply of audience goodwill to everything he does, and if his performance as this wealthy, unyielding disciple of Reagan Republicanism is short on the studied patrician steeliness that Stockard Channing made delicious dinner of, Louis-Dreyfus’s more amiable (at least initially) interpretation is no less thoughtful, if a little less impressive.
Louis-Dreyfus plays Polly Wyeth, a former screenwriter of popular modest films about an adventurous teenage girl (I’m picturing Gidget) who is married to former Hollywood hunk-turned-ambassador Lyman (Ed Harris, but I’m picturing John Gavin), whose years of right leanings (Wyeth is longtime friends with Ron and Nancy and various assorted Bushes) leave her at odds with her liberal, recently sober sister. Is. (and former writing partner) Silda (Allison Janney) and the Wyeths’ two adult children – Trip (Joe Keery), an L.A.-based producer of a cheesy Judge Judy-esque courtroom show (with a celebrity jury, no less) and Brooke (Lily Rabe), a black sheep Sag Harbor-affiliated writer suffering from deep depression and pervasive despair and anger.
No one can blame Brooke (although they do anyway): The Wyeth children used to be three, one of whom died after the suicide of eldest son Henry several years ago.
Set in the grand, non-descript house in mid-century modern Palm Springs, where the elder Wyeth have retreated following the scandalous aftermath of Henry’s suicide (we learn he was a left-wing radical, somehow connected to a deadly Weather Underground-style bombing), the family has gathered for a rare reunion to celebrate Christmas 2004. The big, lavishly decorated Christmas tree is more than just a decoration: It’s a big, white-lit rebuke to the Texas-Jewish upbringing that Polly has worked so hard on through Nancy-esque poise and sophisticated vocals that make Pat Buckley sound more natural. No wonder our first glimpse of Polly is après-tennis in a charming little blue-and-white (and no doubt) athletic ensemble, her beautifully highlighted, jawline-skimming bob completely unconcerned by whatever feat of country club athletics she’s almost certainly just accomplished.
Ed Harris, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Joe Keery
emilio madrid
But even that towering Tannenbaum is no match for Silda, whose bohemian panache – she wears discount Pucci – and show-biz (read Jewish) inclinations (she quotes Tootie Fields) rub off on the clearly sardonic Polly. Polly is so ruthless that we immediately side with Silda (and, of course, Jenny, one of the few performers who can go toe-to-toe with Louis-Dreyfus in the likability department and whose late entry on stage is greeted with thunderous applause).
In the battleground of chosen sides that is the home of Wyeth, daughter Brooke is definitely on Team Silda. In fact, she is Silda Plus. Sad and, in her own way, just as caustic as her mother, Brooke has temporarily bounced back after several months of severe depression and several years of writer’s block, even after the publication of her famous first novel left her family skeptical that she was a one-hit wonder.
Well, surprise and Merry Christmas: Brooke has brought a gift – her new, soon-to-be-published novel (and soon to be quoted in The New Yorker) that is not a novel at all. It is a family memoir, filled with details of the troubled Henry’s suicide and his parents’ abandonment of him.
If the play’s first act is filled with some comparatively mild inter-family needleplay (Polly scolds Brooke – with Louis-Dreyfus’s instantly recognizable comic delivery – by declaring, “Satire is the realm of teenagers and lesbians”) – Act II goes for the jugular. Mom and Dad soon reveal secrets in what they believe will be a cruel public humiliation and attempt to discredit all the family values on which they (and their Republican friends and colleagues) have built lives and reputations.
Polly, in particular, is furious (at least initially, the more easy-going Lyman is, the more even-handed he is – he simply refuses to read, or comment on, the enormous manuscript laid out before him.) As the allegations mount and the mental injuries are recalled, Henry’s story – where he went wrong, why he went wrong, and who is to blame – slowly unfolds.
Without spoiling the big second-act reveal, no one in this play – or in the audience – has an unquestionable claim to the truth. Even the proudly outspoken Silda only shares what she wants to share, and conciliatory son Trip, occupying a middle-ground (or rather a no-man’s-land) between parent and sister, can’t possibly establish anything like a separate peace when he can’t possibly know the full details of this war.
kiri and lily rabe
emilio madrid
Whether or not Baetz’s writing (or Hickey’s direction) can fully support the big leap we’re ultimately expecting will be determined by each person sitting in a Hudson theater seat. I was taken over by someone who was not entirely convinced, and I left the theater questioning the credibility of the story to such an extent that I can’t remember when I saw the original production 15 years ago (the play or my memory? who can say). There are a few clues along the way that, in retrospect, support the big twist, but none convinced me entirely about the overall credibility of the secrets revealed, or their plausibility beyond the dramatic demands of the plot.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that we want To follow this artist wherever he tells us to go, even when it is a very big request. The cast themselves can sometimes seem tentative, particularly Dreyfus during the heavy second act. At some points during the play the otherwise winsome Harris, in a well-reviewed performance, still seemed to find her way through the character and the script. Luckily we’re all set to cut him some slack after a wonderful scene in the first act, in which his ex-actor character recreates an old B-movie death scene that suggests Harris has played more than a few of these roles himself.
In fact, there is no actor so familiar and, yes, beloved by so many in this cast that he can completely escape his own history, and why should they? We’re inclined to give Louis-Dreyfus’s Polly a certain benefit of the doubt because we still love Ellen Benes, an affection that serves the drama’s dynamics and tension well, and we take Janney’s Silda not just because of the character’s humanitarian politics (though of course there’s that too – some of her lines about the brutalities of a certain political party ring truer in this era than in the play’s post-9/11 setting in the universe). But also because we followed Janine since West Wing.
The two young actors may not have had that long of a career, but their talent easily justifies their growing reputations (from Keery). stranger things, From Rabe, among other credits, American Horror Story and a good roster of stage performances). Keery’s charming delivery of several truth-telling speeches proves that the villains don’t get all the juicy, crowd-pleasing moments.
Harris and Rabe
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In fact, Rabe may have the toughest job of all, and not because she’s regularly asked to dance (sometimes loudly) with accomplished and beloved performers like Louis-Dreyfus and Harris. If some people will find Rabe’s often distressed characterization of the appropriately angry, wounded Brooke to be, well, a little bit. excessA fair way of saying this is that we are witnessing the outbursts (outer-directed and inward) of a young woman who bears all the pent-up anger of an imperfect child long suppressed by the superficial perfectionism of an overbearing mother. (And congratulations to Scott Pask for the set-designed Palm Springs interior, which defines perfectionism with its smug, modern, desert elegance).
Rabe also beautifully carries the important weight of the play’s famously ambiguous epilogue, to which director Hickey adds a blink-and-miss-it grace note that raises more questions than it answers. This is a perfectly justified, if not excessive, directorial choice, and one the playwright would surely have approved of. Yes, it’s a little disappointing because of the fleetingness of its execution and its vague resonance, but other desert cities This is nothing if not an excellently designed study of the malleability of long-established truths. Undoubtedly it demands reconsideration till the end.
Topic: other desert cities
venue: Hudson Theater on Broadway
Written by: John Robin Batz
director: John Benjamin Hickey
Mould: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Joe Keery, Lily Rabe
running time: 2 hours 30 minutes (including intermission)