Broadway Review: ‘Other Desert Cities’

Come into the cavernous California living room of the well-known Wyeth family, gathering for good tidings at Christmas Eve, 2004. Over here are the parents - he, a former movie star turned politician; she, a former Texas Jew turned WASP and a one-time Hollywood screenwriter.

Together, they are scions of the state's Republican party, respected members of the nation's old-guard conservatives.

Then there's her sister, also a former screenwriter and a basket-case from the bottle, drying out at the family's Palm Springs manse. And the Wyeth children: a daughter educated at Bryn Mawr who, addled by depression, hasn't been able to produce anything since her smash novel six years back and a son whose Stanford and Berkeley education has led him to TV success as the producer of a reality court show with B-list celebs as the jurors.

In Jon Robin Baitz's searingly funny and jolting new play Other Desert Cities, which opened at Lincoln Center and then again on Broadway Thursday night, this is a family larger than life, and overwhelmed by it. Hanging over them all is the spectre of the sibling who is not with them this Christmas Eve, the son who went off on his own and veered into radical life, a bombing at a recruiting station and an apparent suicide.

Just about every family (or maybe every family, but I'll hedge my bets here) has its little secrets and often, a public face that somehow blots those secrets out. But what happens when the public face becomes stuck in place, so that the private one is shown not even to the grown children, but only to the mirror?

Baitz's richly layered, provoking play could get a Tony for the way it examines that question alone, but it doesn't stop there; it explores many facets of being a family, from the commitment to be unconditionally loving without conditions to the notion of a shared responsibility.

The production of Other Desert Cities is blessed its own family, of actors directed with flair by Joe Mantello. Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach are the parents - each terrific in building two very different and believable people.

Judith Light is the aunt on the wagon, and plays out the woman for every liquorless drop. The two grown children, also entirely credible, are meticulously constructed by Rachel Griffiths and Thomas Sadoski. Jon Robin Baitz has given them a terrific, insightful and often funny play, and they know just what to do with it.