NEW YORK — When I first saw “Other Desert Cities” on Broadway in 2011, it played as a clash between rich, rock-ribbed Republicans, closets full of evening wear and that which cannot be discussed, and their whiny, over-privileged Gen X offspring, critical of everything except their own neuroses and always just one step away from trashing their families to Oprah.
Just to get a hug.
That’s still the play, of course. It’s still the juicy banger of a dysfunctional family play by Jon Robin Baitz, a delicious feast of schadenfreude. Still a takedown of the Hollywood celebrity branch of the GOP as well as the bloodsucking kids of the rich and famous who use their dignified parents’ influence and history to snag sweet media jobs and savvy book agents.
But sitting there at the Hudson Theatre this weekend was also a reminder of how much America and Broadway have changed in 15 years.
Those Ron-and-Nancy-adjacent Hollywood Republicans are now country club fossils. They’d have no MAGA home. Their kids, presented here as incapable of adulthood, now have college-aged offspring of their own, those kids nursing post-COVID hangovers and insisting on trigger warnings and constructing critiques of the very parents who claimed their own feelings were ignored.
Broadway has changed, too. Now the play is stacked with skilled stars, worthy of a limited-run ticket price rapidly rising into the stratosphere.
There’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus, returning to the stage in an atypically dragon-like role — her Seinfeld-era irony swapped for brutal parenting!
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Behold Ed Harris, every contour of his face evoking the craggy Hollywood star turned politician the play demands!
See Alison Janney, famous for sardonic “West Wing” wit but now consumed by playing the alcoholic sister of this old-guard couple, exacting revenge by manipulating the next generation and feeding on its insecurities.
It all feels very much like the autumn’s theatrical event, to use the marketing phraseology its producers no doubt wanted, with actors’ past personas ricocheting their way inside Baitz’s characters. You could find plenty of ways to be cynical about this entire uber-upscale thing, and some surely will, but I had a blast at director John Benjamin Hickey’s pulsing, potent, gilded age production.
This is a top-drawer commercial play from the American theater’s pre-preachy era, back when writers wanted to give both sides a fair shake, leave the audience questioning everything and sending them off ready to dissect the evening over a stiff post-show drink.
Now the question will be whether they have any money left.
All you need to know about the plot here is that Brooke Wyeth, played by Lily Rabe, has arrived at the home of her GOP mainstay parents Polly (Louis-Dreyfus) and Lyman Wyman (Harris) with a manuscript and contract in hand, ready to open up the vault of family secrets. Her brother Trip (Joe Keery), the normative character here, urges caution for a quiet life, but Brooke is a child of therapy seeking self-determination and she barrels into a war with parents terrified their reputations will be trashed, and rightly so. Meanwhile Polly’s sister Silda (Janney), detritus of her own generation, works her machinations on the gushing Brooke.
Much thereafter is revealed in this carefully plotted affair, but the main pleasures of “Other Desert Cities” are its studies in familial type, especially when so exquisitely cast.
Rabe, for example, is an actress with deep-set eyes that make you want to lean forward in your seat to learn their expression as her body flails around the stage as if in a therapist’s chair. It’s a terrific performance, evoking a confused morass of love, fear and determination, the exact opposite of what Harris is doing as the character’s loving father from a different planet (or is he really?). Keery, playing a guy in favor of the unexamined life, bursts like a firework at times, and Janney shows us both a total wreck along with some semblance of what was there before.
Louis-Dreyfus demurs when it comes to firing off the heavy artillery in the way I recall Stockard Channing doing in this role. There has been a generational shift. Louis-Dreyfus is not that far from Gen X herself and that makes her more nuanced Polly all the more interesting if you see this play, as I do, as a meditation on what makes us all the way we are and causes the family fights we all have.
Baitz is, I think, saying that parental and generational pressures fight within us like opposite forces in the Iraqi, or Californian, desert, sometimes in a lifelong truce, but usually looking for the other party’s weapons of mass destruction.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
At the Hudson Theatre, 141 W 44th St, New York; otherdesertcitiesbroadway.com