Below are my two reviews of the original 2011 New York production of “Other Desert Cities,” by Jon Robin Baitz, which I’m resurrecting shortly before the play’s first Broadway revival, set to open October 18, 2026 at the Hudson Theater directed by John Benjamin Hickey and featuring a new, starry five-member cast.
The first review below was originally posted (in a now defunct publication) on February 6, 2011 of the Off-Broadway production at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater. The second, of the Broadway transfer, was in November of that year. Considering the references to Reagan, it might be worth a reminder that play was last presented on Broadway during the Obama administration.
For clarity’s sake, here is a breakdown of the roles: Who played them on Broadway in 2011 and who is playing them in 2026
Lyman Wyeth, the father: Stacy Keach then; now Ed Harris
Polly Wyeth, the mother: Stockard Channing then, now Julia Louis-Drefyfus making her Broadway debut
Brook Wyeth, the daughter: Rachel Griffiths then, making her Broadway debut; now Lily Rabe
Trip Wyeth, the son: Thomas Sadoski then, now Joe Keery making his Broadway debut)
Silda Grauman, the aunt: Judith Light then (who won a Tony for the role), now Allison Janney
The original Broadway production opened on November 3, 2011 and ran from October 12, 2011 to June 17, 2012. It received five Tony nominations, including for best play, winning the one for Judith Light.
The ending of my Broadway review could count as ironic.
Reagan Without Reaganism?
It would have been Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday on February 6th, 2011, which seems the right timing for Lincoln Center’s extraordinarily well-acted production of Jon Robin Baitz’s “Other Desert Cities,” a new play with a script that would itself be extraordinary if it were not for the bizarre, almost self-parodying twist of the final 15 minutes.
From the moment that Lyman and Polly Wyeth come onto the stage in tennis whites, they seem strikingly like Ron and Nancy Reagan, an affable California couple with a sheen of wealth and glamor, played by the never-better Stacy Keith and Stockard Channing.
It turns out that the Wyeths of the playwright’s imagination were not only friends of the Reagans; like the Reagans, they started out as a Hollywood couple and went into Republican politics. The Wyeths are said to be modeled after John Gavin, an actor turned politician (Reagan’s ambassador to Mexico) and Gavin’s wife, actress Constance Towers. John Gavin was friends with Ronald Reagan; his wife is friends with Nancy. But whatever the playwright’s conscious model, the interaction between this spirited, aging couple and their children seems clearly inspired by the Reagans, although the particulars of the Wyeth family story are heightened by a past tragedy and then flattened into melodrama.
For the first time in half a dozen years, the Wyeth’s daughter Brooke (Elizabeth Marvel) is visiting her family in their modern ranch-style home of sleek creamy furniture and angular stone fireplace in the desert of Palm Springs. (John Lee Beatty’s set seems a dead-on re-creation of the kind of expensively fake Western décor favored by affluent Californians). A novelist who lives on the isolated Eastern tip of Long Island, Brooke recently emerged from a long bout of depression and years of writer’s block, and is now returning to California in Christmas, 2004. Her aim, though, is not a holiday visit; she presents them with the second book she has just completed, a memoir that deals with the death years earlier of her beloved older brother Henry, who got involved in violent radical politics.
The book exposes her parents as hypocrites and cowards. But, as it turns out, she has got it all wrong – or at least, by the end of an evening of screaming confrontations and long-held secrets suddenly revealed, we are meant to see that nobody in the family is completely right or wrong.
The central clashes are between mother and daughter. The two contrast with one another in almost every way – left vs. right in politics, East Coast vs. West Coast in style, even blonde vs. dark. When we first see her, Brooke is dressed sloppily and wearing a head rag – looking, according to her mother, like a librarian in Kabul. But there is a complex family dynamic at play that also includes Brooke’s younger brother Trip (Thomas Sadoski, last on Broadway in “reasons to be pretty”), who is the family conciliator, and Polly’s alcoholic sister, only recently back on the wagon, Silda Grauman (Linda Lavin).
The five actors form a nearly musical quintet that allows for virtuosic solos and orchestrated clashes, as well as quieter duets of repartee. The precision of these performances is what makes “Other Desert Cities” worth watching even when it’s not worth listening to. Although I am reluctant to wade into the forest full of articles connected to Reagan’s 100th birthday, the few I’ve read felt like context or inspiration for “Other Desert Cities.” From an article in the Washington Post by Reagan biographer Edmund Morris: “His three younger children have publicly stated that there were times (decades before any rumors of dementia) when he treated them as complete strangers.”
As seems apparent with the Reagan family, the dynamic of Baitz’s Wyeth family involves something other than politics, despite the explicitly stated differences in political views at the beginning of the play. The politics never seem to matter that much in “Other Desert Cities” (and indeed are essentially dropped in the second act). In a similar way, you wonder how much Reagan’s growing public appeal has to do with his California disposition – sunny and disengaged – rather than any specific political policies. At one point in Baitz’s play there is talk of a character – a judge on the reality show that brother Trip has created – who exhibits “moral rectitude and good hair.” At another, Lyman, the character played by Stacy Keach, argues with his daughter for the merits of avoiding unpleasantness of any sort, including the truth: “A lot of people get through the entirety of their lives pretending; at a certain point, it’s not the worst thing to do.”
Family Is No Holiday
The holidays are hell for the Wyeth family of “Other Desert Cities,” as they seem to be for most fictional families, far more than real ones. Home for the holidays for the first time in six years, daughter Brooke confronts her Reagan-like parents – show business folk who went more into Republican politics – with a book she has just written about the family’s darkest time, the suicide of their son after he was implicated in a Vietnam War-era bombing of a military recruiting station
When I reviewed “Other Desert Cities” last season at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater, I called the acting extraordinary but the script less so largely because of its final plot twist. It has now transferred to Broadway’s Booth Theater, three of its five-member cast the same – Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach as the charming parents, and Thomas Sadoski as the apolitical TV-producer brother – and two replacements, Rachel Griffiths instead of Elizabeth Marvel as the leftist, once-broken Brooke, and Judith Light instead of Linda Lavin as the in-recovery alcoholic aunt who egged Brooke on to write her scathing memoir.
“Other Desert Cities” remains rewarding because of the performances. The cast changes are something of a revelation. Rachel Griffiths, making her New York stage debut, feels more a part of this California family, even though the actress is actually from Australia. This may be in part because we know her from her roles on TV in both “Six Feet Under” and “Brothers and Sisters” in which she plays a Californian. But she is also more physical – she several times playfully kicks her brother. Marvel felt much more the darker and darker-haired New Yorker, not just estranged from her family but seceded from it. Judith Light seems more a part of the family as well, but in a different way. Lavin was a whiskey-voiced wise-cracker – a quipping actress playing to the (appreciative) audience; Light is more evidently dysfunctional, much more lost as a character and lost in her character. These are not better or worse interpretations, just different, and equally engaging.
The five actors again form a nearly musical quintet. The precision of these performances is what makes “Other Desert Cities” worth watching, even when it’s not worth listening to. Jon Robin Baitz, who had precocious success in his twenties with such plays as “The Substance of Fire” and conceived the television series “Brothers & Sisters,” is only now, at age 50, making his Broadway debut. Others have been lauding his latest play as a breakthrough, comparing it to the work of Arthur Miller or Lillian Hellman. Surely, “Other Desert Cities” is smart, swift, with plenty of quips and satisfying confrontations. But Jon Robin Baitz is no Arthur Miller or Lillian Hellman, at least not in “Other Desert Cities.” Despite its allusions to Reagan and the left-right divide, “Other Desert Cities” is not really about politics – not really grappling with, say, the dysfunction of the polarized American body politic. It’s Reagan without Reaganism, focusing on the charisma of the man (or a man like Reagan) and the dynamics of a Reagan-like family. We are drawn to these characters the way we were drawn to the Reagans, for their celebrity and their sunniness and their contradictions.
The ending bothers me less than it did in part because it no longer comes as a surprise, in part because (without giving away the particulars) I realize it is of a piece with the apolitical nature of what only appears to be a political play.
Baitz is not old-school Broadway; he’s no Broadway baby. He’s a TV baby, a child of California, graduate of Beverly Hills High School even though, because of his father’s job, he grew up in Brazil and South Africa. I do not invoke television automatically as condemnation; I think theater critics should get out of the wide-spread habit of dismissing a work of theater by saying it resembles a television series. There have been many deeply entertaining TV shows, and Baitz has worked on several of them. It seems unlikely, however, that “Other Desert Cities” will be routinely studied or regularly revived the way Miller’s work is. That would be its second surprise ending.
