Other Desert Cities

I don’t often do reviews.  I figure that’s why we have newspapers, radio and television.  But I can’t get Other Desert Cities, by Jon Robin Baitz, out of my mind.  It was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. It's a drama that explores the dynamics of a family divided by politics and tragedy as the adult daughter prepares to publish her memoir.

Review in SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

Family relationships illuminated in PTC’s ‘Other Desert Cities’

Review » Powerful performances explore the line between loyalty to self and family.

By Barbara M. Bannon

First Published Oct 26 2013 03:32 pm • Last Updated Oct 28 2013 01:43 pm

How well do we know anybody? How well can we know anybody else? Our families are the people we should know best; after all, we spend most of our lives with them. But even they remain essentially mysteries unless they let us look beneath the faces they show to the world or we can develop the eyes to see there.

Jon Robin Baitz’s acclaimed "Other Desert Cities," which just opened in an emotionally shattering production at Pioneer Theatre Company, plunges us into the middle of a complicated family with a secret and lets us watch its members learn to know each other better and love and accept the people they find there.

This is one of the richest American plays to emerge recently. First, it offers complex, densely drawn characters that are also witty and clever. And it turns around in a most unexpected, but completely logical, way. At the end of Act I, we think we know these people; Act II develops a different dimension that shows how wrong we are.

The occasion is a Wyeth family Christmas reunion in Palm Springs, Calif. The family hasn’t been together in some time. The parents, Polly and Lyman, formerly worked in Hollywood and became prominent in conservative Republican politics during the Reagan years. Their children, Brooke and Trip, don’t share their parents’ views, either politically or in most other ways. The play’s fifth character is Polly’s sister, Silda, a glib, acerbic woman who once was Polly’s writing partner and is now a recovering alcoholic.

But the play has another crucial character that never appears. He is Henry, Brooke and Trip’s brother who was an antiwar activist during the Vietnam War, became involved in a bombing incident and killed himself. Brooke, who is an author, has written a memoir she intends to publish where he is an integral character. She says, "I want to talk about Henry until it makes sense" because he was "most of my world." Her parents are appalled.

Polly says, "You may write whatever you like, but the ice gets thin when it involves we, the living." And Lyman adds, "You insist that we publicly relive the worst time in our life."

If Brooke goes ahead, as Trip says, she has "to accept the consequences of ‘art over life,’ which … is … losing the trust of the people you love," but if she doesn’t, she feels "you are asking me to shut down something that makes me possible."

Charles Morey’s direction tunes unerringly into the family’s emotional rhythms, letting the tension ebb and tighten.

 Its ability to let us look beneath the surface of its characters makes "Other Desert Cities" poignant and powerful. The insights it offers may make our own family relationships more understandable.

End of Tribune review.

In discussing it afterwards, Amy pointed out how each family member felt smugly perfect in his/her own beliefs while criticizing others for their personal beliefs and actions.  Brooke was intellectually snobbish and wouldn’t even watch her younger brother’s television show.  In fact, she didn’t watch television at all.  Silda, the recovering alcoholic sister who couldn’t even function on her own, was critical of her sister and her husband and collaborated on Brooke’s book without revealing that she had failed Henry when he came begging her for help and had loved and trusted her.  The well-heeled mother and dad maybe didn’t know when they were on stage or off.  Acclaim at any cost was their game.  They harbored the secret that changed everything.  I thought they did what they thought was best for the family but that shows my biases. How little we really know.  And how can we judge when we don’t have all the facts?

Doug Frizzso on Radio West says every Utah family should see the play.  It’s about all of us, even when our tragedies aren’t as weighty.  The essence is the same. 

How you love.