Review: Other Desert Cities Revival, a Triumphant Broadway Debut for Julia Louis-Dreyfus

The central fallacy of movement conservatism is the assumption that market economics are family friendly. Anyone who has ever had to leave their family in a crumbling rustbelt town to chase opportunities elsewhere knows this is false. There’s a steady demand for fentanyl, and the vast supply offered by intrepid entrepreneurs helps destroy American families every day.

And although there is a robust market for salacious tell-all memoirs about prominent Americans, the forthcoming release of one about the Wyeth family promises to be ruinous for them in the Broadway revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities at the Hudson Theatre.

At least, that is the position of Polly Wyeth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), the screenwriter wife of movie-star-turned-GOP-grandee Lyman Wyeth (Ed Harris). She describes Nancy Reagan as “like a big sister to me,” and although she and Lyman have retreated from Hollywood to the friendlier, more arid climate of Palm Springs, they still regularly attend Republican fundraisers.

But the afterglow of reelecting George W. Bush (the play takes place Christmas 2004) quickly darkens when she realizes that her mentally ill daughter Brooke (Lily Rabe) is about to release a book about them, written with the collusion of her treacherous alcoholic sister, Silda (Allison Janney). It specifically covers their relationship with her older brother Henry, who was implicated in a fatal terrorist bombing and committed suicide shortly after.

The book is an indictment, drawing a direct line from Mom and Dad’s conservative politics to this family tragedy Polly would rather everyone forget. Ludicrously, Brooke wants their blessing. She has brought copies for everyone to read on Christmas eve (fun!), though it’s clear from the outset they’ll never give it. Her younger brother, Trip (Joe Keery), offers Brooke the most useful advice when he says, “If you’re going to go ahead, do it without apology or drama.” But then there would be no play.

Other Desert Cities debuted at Lincoln Center Theater in 2011 and transferred to Broadway that year. But this throwback to the drawing-room comedies of the early 20^th century, with rich folks incanting sparkling dialogue and the audience lapping it up like champagne, makes it feel like theater of a considerably older vintage.

“If you have a lousy serve, you have a lousy serve, darling, and if all it takes to win is to tell you that I think this war is entirely justified, well then, maybe you shouldn’t be playing tennis,” mother tells daughter in an earlier, happier moment, a line that is greeted with torrents of laughter from the audience.

It’s obvious why Louis-Dreyfus chose this role for her Broadway debut. Through seven seasons on Veep, she exhibited an unparalleled ability to inject humor into every phrase and eyeroll, giving us permission to laugh at Selina Meyer’s selfish (but sometimes uncomfortably relatable) behavior. She brings that magic to the Hudson and has the audience eating out of her hand within minutes.

For Polly the Reaganite, humor is a deterrent weapon, but she is unafraid to escalate to harder tactics. As the script shifts in tone, Louis-Dreyfus moves with the decisiveness of a medieval queen. It’s the ideal interpretation of this gorgon from the golden age of the lacerating WASP matriarch—which, Baitz persuades, is more of an aspirational identity.

“We’re Jewish girls who lost their accents along the way, but for you that wasn’t enough, you had to become a goy, too,” Silda remarks as her sister stuffs stockings upstage of the remote-operated Christmas tree. Janney is equally well-suited to the role of the sharp-tongued troublemaking sister who practically dares family values Polly to toss her out. Every acid retort is timed to the millisecond, as it should be for a live-in nuisance with no other occupation.

The production further benefits from Harris’s credible performance as a kindly, exhausted patriarch hoping to run out the clock with dignity. Keery embodies a smart but rarely heard youngest son in his own impressive Broadway debut. Rabe, one of the great stage actors of our time, musters the strongest approach to a character who could easily come off as a spoiled screw-up trading on the family name. Her Brooke is Antigone, standing up for the memory of a beloved brother and in doing so, challenging a rotten status quo.

Director John Benjamin Hickey wisely steps out of the way of his A-list cast while providing them with the best of accommodations. Scott Pask’s set is a California real estate agent’s dream, complete with tasteful art and a working fireplace. We know exactly what kind of people these are from the way the navy trim on the elegant coffee service matches Polly’s tennis outfit. Tom Broecker costumes them for a Brooks Brothers display case, with Silda’s garish duds pointedly dissenting. The godlike lighting designer Natasha Katz delivers a gorgeous desert sunset. And sound designer Mikaal Sulaiman sustains the tension with stormy, vaguely holiday-flavored original music.

It’s a first-rate production, in many ways better than the original. But a revisit of Other Desert Cities, even one as beautifully rendered as this, reveals the play’s limitations. Not even Rabe can fully sell her character’s overwritten monologues as sparkling comedy flattens into increasingly unpalatable melodrama. The big reveals come, but don’t feel nearly as shocking as they’re meant to. Then Baitz ties up loose ends with cheap sentiment and a slapdash epilogue.

Other Desert Cities is completely convincing on two points, though: Children have a way of humiliating our proudly stated ideals; and the family, that ancient unit of human society, will survive this period of market orthodoxy, which was ushered in by Reagan and Thatcher, and now seems to be drawing to a close.