By Lucy Komisar
The acting in Jon Robin Baitz’s dark comic play is superb. The script, regrettably, is not. It’s a high-level sitcom-soap opera where the setups don’t make sense.
We are in the elegant Palm Springs home of Polly (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Lyman Wyeth (Ed Harris). A beige brick wall at the back is covered with paintings, a long couch sits in front, the floor holds statues and vases, to the side a fireplace burns logs, and palm trees show through high windows. A home of the monied class.
It is 2004. Visiting are the Wyeths’ young son Trip (Joe Keery), in his 20s, from nearby Los Angeles where he produces a TV show about a small claims court (your call), and daughter Brooke (Lily Rabe), in her 30s, a writer from Sag Harbor—the not-too-chic Hamptons town that used to be affordable for writers. Staying for an indeterminate time is Polly’s recovering alcoholic sister Silda (Allison Janney), with whom she once wrote movie scripts. Lyman was a film actor and later a politician.
They have just played doubles tennis. Polly is smashing in a blue and white tennis dress, and she disdains Brooke’s unexceptional shorts and top, remarking that she dresses like a refugee in Kabul. Later Polly appears in an elegant red jacket, slim black pants, and heels; Brooke, with straggly long blonde hair, stays in jeans and a black sweater under a gray T-shirt. In any garb, Louis-Dreyfus is a terrific self-absorbed bully.
The first half makes sense and fits neatly with current memes about the political divide. They are going out to Christmas eve dinner.
Trip: “Jesus, Mom, who has Christmas at a country club?”
Brooke: “Jews is who has Christmas at a country club. That’s why God made country clubs—so half-goy hipsters and their aging parents don’t have to cook.”
Polly: “Oh, it’s terrific. Stone crab claws, Bloody Marys, chink food, and a mambo band.”
Brooke: “Did you just say ‘chink food’?”
Lily Rabe is perfect as the writer whose psychological difficulties appear tethered to legitimate moral concerns.
Polly explains why she stopped writing films: once it became about drugs and lefties whining, she was out. Brooke shoots back: “Yep, that’s the downfall of us all, Polly—lefties whining all over the place. I’m going. I’m going. I don’t want to be late for my conference call with Al Qaeda.”
Polly and Lyman are close to “Nancy and Ron” (Reagan) and other prominent California Republican royalty —Betsy Bloomingdale, Mrs. Annenberg. Reagan made Lyman an ambassador.
Allison Janney gives a, brilliant performance as the funny strung-out Silda. Polly shows her inner cruelty by tempting her with a drink; Silda sniffs it and jokes that maybe she could get high on the smell.
Polly: “I just think—the only way to get someone to not be an invalid is to refuse to treat them as such.” Silda: “And there it is, folks: the entire GOP platform in a nutshell.” Silda comments on a Lyman war film: “It’s America. We get warm and fuzzy about war.”
Have we set the political stage? Isn’t this a terrific play for lefties?
Brooke has recovered from several years of depression during which she was hospitalized. A success with her first novel, she has written a book about the family and the missing older son. Starting it as a novel, she turned it into memoir. She should have stuck with fiction.
The center of the book is the secret story of Henry. As a teen, his parents forbade him from expressing anti-war sentiments and banned his friends. He fell in with a drug cult in Venice bombed an army recruiting station and killed a worker. Then he disappeared. A suicide note and ragged clothes were found on a ferry moving through freezing waters off Seattle. Three people are in prison for the bombing.
Brooke wants her parents blessing for the book. Trip says it’s the best thing she’s ever written—and that it paints Polly and Lyman as rightwing sociopaths. They protest it will destroy the family.
It turns out that everything is not as it seems. No spoiler alert here, but there is a revelation that, in the context of all that came before, especially Polly’s right-wing nastiness, what Sidla called Polly’s “Pat Buckley schtick,” could be real or could be a trick. Were Polly and Lyman now real or were they acting a script, a talent burnished by their careers. If there was a red herring, what was it? You don’t really know. A muddled conclusion.
Direction by John Benjamin Hickey is fine. You believe you are there. Then you begin to realize that it all makes no sense.
“Other Desert Cities.” Written by Jon Robin Bitz, directed by John Benjamin Hickey. Hudson Theatre, 141 West 44th St, NYC. Runtime 2hrs30min. Opened Oct 18, 2026, closes Jan 17, 2027.