Allison Janney and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Different Desert Cities, on the Hudson Theatre.
Photograph: Emilio Madrid
If for some cause you’d wish to really feel prefer it’s 2011 and even 2004 once more (and pay $800 to do it!), Different Desert Cities is pleased to oblige you. Again on Broadway 15 years after its premiere, plus one other seven from when the majority of its motion is about, Jon Robin Baitz’s rich-family-with-secrets play is, in its present kind, at greatest a trippy expertise. Extra usually, that mildly amusing sense of displacement (the place am I? When am I? Look, it’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus!) curdles into one thing tougher to swallow. The play strikes a pose of cultural commentary — even of heavyweight subject drama; it was Pulitzer-nominated in 2012 — however its essence is extra daytime cleaning soap than scathing cri de coeur. Politics, as was nonetheless doable on loads of phases a decade and a half in the past, is the spice added to the deeply normal meat and potatoes of its construction. To proceed the metaphor, if the play have been a meal made by its central matriarch, Polly Wyeth — a caustic SoCal retiree who runs with Nancy Reagan and desires to know when everyone bought “so rattling delicate about each last item” — she’d in all probability current it with a wink and describe it as ethnic.
Or perhaps she’d simply name it “Chink meals,” precise phrases dropped by the character so early on that we’ve hardly completed settling into our seats. Are we purported to approve of them? In fact not, however that’s hardly the purpose. Baitz’s play trafficks within the form of humor that we’ve lastly began, previously decade and a half, to level to for what it’s: neoliberal pandering that makes ample area for the Pollys and Polly-sympathizers of the world to giggle safely at midnight whereas a frisson of “Oh, that’s naughty, however gosh, I too get so bored with political correctness” runs by the air. If we’re going to show Broadway right into a machine for letting individuals sit near celebrities for an exorbitant payment, can’t we at the very least put these celebrities in performs that really feel much less dated? (Even perhaps new ones?) Like too many business productions, Different Desert Cities isn’t notably eager about what theater can or would possibly do aside from form itself round a sure group of well-known individuals. Becoming a member of Louis-Dreyfus’s Polly are Ed Harris as her husband, an all-American film star turned politician within the Reagan-Eastwood-Wayne secure named Lyman; Allison Janney as her Elaine Stritch–ian, not too long ago on-the-wagon sister, Silda; Lily Rabe as Polly and Lyman’s daughter, Brooke, a author who struggles with despair; and Joe Keery (aka Djo and/or Steve from Stranger Issues) as their son Journey, the peacekeeping, pleasure-oriented cynic to Brooke’s brooding, goading reality seeker.
That Polly and Lyman, who stay in a home that appears like a Palm Springs Hilton, are “old-guard Republicans in Hollywood” and their Gen X daughter excoriates their politics generates sufficient materials to push sure scenes alongside, but it surely’s probably not the crux of Baitz’s play. That might be the previous Memoir Threatens to Inform All gadget. After a protracted stint in a psychological hospital and several other extra years within the Northeast with the freedom-hating liberal elites, Brooke has written a ebook that she has not solely bought “to the primary individuals who learn it” however that may shortly be excerpted in The New Yorker. Brooke has arrived again on the household homestead within the California desert on Christmas Eve, bearing copies of her manuscript like a sinister Santa Claus. She desires her household’s blessing earlier than the publishing machine will get rolling, however, as she tells her brother, it’s “not gonna be really easy” as a result of the ebook “is about Henry. Whom we are able to’t discuss, it’s about our brother, who went to struggle with our dad and mom, joined a cult, disappeared, after which planted a bomb in a military recruiting station, earlier than killing himself — is what it’s truly about.”
At the least, as handy exposition goes, it’s trustworthy. The psychic scar left by the Wyeths’ eldest boy — was he the right brother or a reckless drug addict or a courageous antiwar radical? And why, Brooke agonizes, didn’t their dad and mom attempt to assist him earlier than it was too late? — is what all that is truly about. Baitz’s title is supposed to make us suppose, amongst different issues, of Baghdad, the place “so many individuals are dying in a desert, hundreds of miles away,” Silda upbraids her sister, however we are able to’t actually think about one thing about which the play has so little formal curiosity. It’s as if we’re at a cocktail party listening to dishy gossip and sometimes the TV within the different room mumbles one thing concerning the morbid state of the world. Everybody will take a bit of dutiful pause to nod in settlement — sure, issues are unhealthy, however now inform us extra about Henry. For a manufacturing in 2026, it’s additionally an extra-high hurdle to make us actually care concerning the struggles of those very rich Bush supporters and their daughter who apparently needed to spend all of 5 minutes purchasing her trauma-inspired autofiction. John Benjamin Hickey’s play-it-as-it-lays revival extra continuously chooses to fake that the impediment isn’t there.
Because the creator of that autofiction, Brooke is our true protagonist, the viewers’s stand-in — she’s a author who decamped to New York, so in fact she is. However particularly as Different Desert Cities progresses, there’s one thing queasy about how maimed her life has been, not by her dad and mom however by her playwright. Pleading, after which basically threatening, for details about her brother is the character’s important perform. And whereas Baitz doesn’t present literal ages, Brooke is hardly a child: It’s 2004, and the struggle that drove a tragic wedge between her dad and mom and her older brother was Vietnam. Presumably in her 40s, she’s been outlined by a single trauma since she was a younger teen, which isn’t a lot unbelievable as it’s uninteresting. As a personality she’s too blocky and grim to be compelling; we must sympathize together with her, however she doesn’t hearth up our hearts. It’s a tough position, and Rabe appears actively uncomfortable in it. When she’s standing, her knees are nearly at all times unnaturally bent, as if she’s making an attempt to disguise her top. All she has to go on is bewilderment and ache, and that single notice will get skinny fairly shortly.
It’s no shock that Different Desert Cities is headed towards a grand twist — theater of the 2010s liked home skirmish adopted by a shattering eleventh-hour revelation — and to speak concerning the play in full, I’d must spoil it. I gained’t, however suffice to say, it’s the form of retcon that’s solely satisfying should you don’t poke at it an excessive amount of. Particularly in terms of poor Brooke. Her life — to not point out Journey’s life, although Keery is squirreled away in the back of the stage in the course of the climax — is rewritten within the present’s final quarter-hour, as new trauma is bought to us as decision of the previous. It’s taken Brooke 30-odd years of author’s block and suicidal ideation to wrestle together with her experiences; it takes her 30 seconds of screamy monologue to maneuver by disaster towards catharsis.
All the pieces I’m laying at Baitz’s door right here belongs not simply to Different Desert Cities however to a complete style of recent American playwriting, one which lets its audiences really feel like they’ve grappled with one thing critical whereas actually encouraging their brains to calm down into basic melodrama. The pleasures of such performs aren’t holistic — they arrive in flashes, like, as an illustration, a withering showpiece of a speech that Keery delivers with a contact of crazy-eye whereas rolling a joint, or each time Allison Janney speaks. For some time, I believed Louis-Dreyfus had been miscast as Polly and that Janney — harder-edged, drier, claws extra uncovered — was the true match for the half. However Janney’s so good at no matter she does, together with throwing shade whereas swanning round in caftans, that I quickly embraced her arch, not-so-secretly pitiful Silda. As for Polly, Louis-Dreyfus doesn’t terrify us within the half — and she or he and Rabe by no means fairly appear to match up as mom and daughter — however she does fill it out with a special form of efficiency. She’s not a Stockard Channing (who originated the position within the present’s premiere each on and off Broadway). She’s nicer than that, with out Channing’s preternatural acerbity. There’s a pure screwball buoyancy to her that she’s largely working to stiffen right here however that does paint its personal image, one of many excellent homemaker who was a comedy screenwriter however gave it up so she may help her husband as he joined Ronnie’s cupboard. On the identical time, Harris, nearer in age to his half than the ladies, strikes and sounds just like the previous cowboys, with an affecting notice of sorrow — the lion dying, and dying with regrets — sounding all through his efficiency. If solely these actors may dedicate themselves to materials extra worthy of all our time. And if solely their names, as gifted as they’re, weren’t so massive part of such an more and more dispiriting sport.
Different Desert Cities is on the Hudson Theatre.
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