Thoughts on "Other Desert Cities

A couple weeks ago I saw Other Desert Cities, Jon Robin Baitz’s latest entry to the crowded Parthenon of dysfunctional family dramedies.  In the play, the burden of a misunderstood tragedy, perpetuated by a secret, has caused innumerable tiny fissures in the foundation of a great American family, leading to its eventual collapse and rebirth.  And while this definitely rises above the melodrama of his television show Brothers and Sisters, the similarities did give me pause at first.

In simplest terms, the story is about a daughter who returns home at Christmas to visit her parents, aunt and brother. A once-promising novelist, she announces to her family the imminent publication of a memoir dredging up a pivotal and tragic event in the family's history - a wound that her parents don't want reopened.All the character archetypes are familiar—the sister is the whiny, ubereducated woah-is-me liberal, her younger brother, the overlooked child who self-anesthetizes via superficiality and a biting sarcastic streak, mom and dad of the old republican guard, and the crazy alcoholic Aunt who likes to dish out truths but can’t take them herself.

In the first act the roles feel somewhat stale and predictable.  While the dialogue is snappy and fun, the situation feels worn and stale.  Rachel Griffiths, Justin Kirk and Judith Light bring little dimension to their roles.  They come off as flat, and not particularly engaging.  What saves the first act from mediocrity is the wonderfully bitchy matriarch Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach, whose nuanced performance as head of the family was moving and believable.  Part Ronald Reagan, part Swede Levov, this character’s layered complicated role and conflicting sense of self comes through in his constant stopping and starting of thoughts, his pleading with his wife and child, his desire above all to keep the past dead and buried.  Here we start to realize that all is not as it seems, that the image of republican rigidness and self-righteousness his son and daughter see is merely a role, one that in the final act of the play is effectively turned on its head.  It is revealed that how we have come to understand his character is really just a single perspective, lacking all the evidence.

Few plays have pulled off the twist ending with more aplomb than Other Desert Cities.  These old guard conservatives are a lot more complicated than the one-dimensional caricatures their children see.  Families, like politics, operate on the same type of carefully constructed fictions that require utter devotion to in order to survive.