Political Skirmishes in “Other Desert Cities” and “A Bright Room Called Day”
On the night that I attended the current Broadway revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s 2010 play, “Other Desert Cities,” there was a mad clapper at large, a mercenary determined to let us know whose side he was on. It was clear which actor he favored: Joe Keery, who shot to fame on the Netflix hit “Stranger Things” as the moody, mulleted Steve Harrington, a small-town doofus drafted into a teen militia. In “Other Desert Cities,” Keery plays a different sort of conscript, the quietly perceptive reality-TV producer Trip Wyeth, a louche charmer negotiating a ceasefire between his neocon parents and his sister, Brooke, who is threatening to spill the family’s secrets in the pages of this very magazine. I have no idea whether the clapper was a Keery superfan or just agreed with Trip’s critique of his family, but he wasn’t wrong on either count, with the actor delivering a career-making performance: loose, bright, and unpredictable. After his best speech—a witty stem-winder that ends with the declaration “I am California! And California is not happy!”—I was tempted to clap, too.
Unfortunately, the starry ensemble surrounding Keery felt unevenly weighted and off-kilter, like billiard balls only occasionally landing in the pocket. Baitz’s story is set in Palm Springs, in December, 2004, at the home of Polly and Lyman Wyeth, an opulent sandstone aerie with meditative views of the desert, a massive Christmas tree, and portraits of eminences like Barry Goldwater. The Wyeths are Republican grandees and L.A. royalty: Polly (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, all sparkle and venom) is a retired screenwriter, Lyman (a craggy, mournful Ed Harris) a former Hollywood cowboy. Polly, a verbal sharpshooter in a family of clay pigeons, is a dab hand at witticisms like “Sarcasm is the purview of teen-agers and homosexuals,” but if she’s a casual bigot she’s also a reinventor, a steerer of fates: a Jewish go-getter from Texas, she co-wrote frothy commercial films with her sister, then married into Wasp aristocracy with Lyman, who became a government ambassador after their pal “Ronnie” got elected President. By the time we meet the couple, however, that’s ancient history: the Iraq War is raging, and they rarely leave Palm Springs, where they’re in a right-wing bubble, barely tolerating Polly’s now estranged sister, Silda, a lefty dipsomaniac fresh out of rehab, who is played with leggy relish by Allison Janney. The plot revolves, as it inevitably does in shows like this, around a collective trauma. Here, it’s the loss of a third sibling, a radical son who, in the chaos of the seventies, blew up his life and warped the family trajectory. That’s the dark story Brooke is ready to tell the world in a manuscript she’s brought from Sag Harbor—the world’s least welcome Christmas present.
This material should feel resonant, given how many families are split right now—over MAGA, over Israel—and how much of a default confessionalism has become online. (These days, Brooke could post an incendiary tweet storm and skip the airfare.) The script is full of pungent, funny debates about power, with observations that still land. “Families get terrorized by their weakest member,” Polly argues. And Trip tells Brooke, “Isn’t it revenge enough that everyone worries about you all the time?” If the exposition creaks, the cast is sprightly, and, for a long time, it’s a blast to watch them spar, particularly Louis-Dreyfus, who scores laughs off the smallest phrases—a disgusted “amongst the Basques,” say. Together, she and Harris capture something formidable about the slice of Old Hollywood the Wyeths represent—sybaritic and hypocritical, brined in self-pity but with a fierce, glamorous quality.
The primary problem is, unfortunately, Lily Rabe, who plays Brooke in a different, blunter register than everyone else onstage. I’ve seen Rabe give beautiful, varied performances, from her dignified Hermione in this past summer’s “The Winter’s Tale” to her demon-possessed nun in “American Horror Story,” gyrating saucily to “You Don’t Own Me.” In “Other Desert Cities,” she’s all sulk and grimace. To be fair, it’s a hard role: Brooke is a solipsistic bummer, a frustrated writer who spends months in a mental hospital being tended to by her mother, then ambushes her with a score-settling tell-all. Instead of seeming righteous but flawed, Rabe’s Brooke validates Polly’s harsh judgment that she’s a reckless brat convinced her truth is the only truth. When, in the final act, a twist reframes the Wyeths’ behavior as, if not fully sympathetic, more understandable, it just made me furrow my brow. By then, it was hard to imagine Brooke’s parents opening up and easier to imagine them manipulating her—defusing, by any means necessary, their daughter’s incendiary literary device.
Even so, I had fun. I loved every costume and considered trying to dress more like a Palm Springs Republican, as Polly would want me to. And there was even, perversely, a touch of escapism to the experience. “Other Desert Cities,” so topical in 2010, now feels as if it were written in the Paleolithic era. If the Wyeths are monsters, they’re also dinosaurs, eclipsed by the nihilists who followed. There’s a wonderful moment when Harris puts on a show, mimicking the death scenes he specialized in onscreen: he buckles at phantom gunshots, then mimes shock, his torso atilt. It was his one true skill, Lyman says, modestly, with a Reaganite twinkle—he always knew how to make an exit.
Two nights later, I went to Crown Heights to catch a revival of a play that felt much more timely, despite having débuted in 1987 and being set in the nineteen-thirties. A tiny, passionate production of Tony Kushner’s “A Bright Room Called Day,” directed by Rachel Gita Karp, was being staged in a town house in the heart of Brooklyn’s so-called Commie Corridor, which helped steer Mayor Zohran Mamdani to victory. As I reclined on a sofa, sipping rosé, a cadre of Berlin bohemians—Reds, fellow- travellers, anarchists, and homosexuals; actors, socialist-realist painters, and writers—began celebrating New Year’s Eve, 1932, at a kitchen table just a few feet away. Lifting glasses of champagne, they toasted, giddily, to “health, happiness, and relative safety on this fierce and splendid night and for many years to come.” It flashed me back to nights of political hope in recent decades, and I felt sick.
“Day” is Kushner’s début—his early problem play, which premièred, in San Francisco, four years before “Angels in America.” At the time, the project felt hyperbolic, largely because of the finger-wagging interventions of Zillah, a modern-day punk anarchist who ranted about Reagan as a new Hitler. (With “Angels,” Kushner found a more fruitful comparison: Roy Cohn and the Red Scare.) Zillah’s speeches have since been reworked, most notably in a 2019 production in which a Kushner-y character called Xillah debated her, framing the story with an anxious meta-narrative. By then, the Hitler comparisons had a different feel: if Kushner had once been the boy who cried wolf, the wolf was at the door.
In 2026, the gemlike Brooklyn venue lent Kushner’s project a magical quality, turning the audience into ghosts from the future, eavesdropping on the fall of the Weimar Republic but unable to intervene. There was no meta frame, and although Zillah still chimed in, it was in smaller doses—and the truth is, we no longer needed her guidance. As the characters playfully debated the rise of Fascism, the dialogue often felt transcribed from some Brooklyn polycule. Is class the best lens for understanding Hitler’s appeal, or is daddy worship? Can anything be learned from sleeping with Nazis? When, ultimately, is it time to flee? The cast was excellent, particularly a sad, sexy Molly Rose Heller as Agnes, a movie actress clinging to her perfect Berlin rental, Jonathan Bock as her Trotskyite beau, a poignant Portal Rose as a sexual adventurer, and Aja Downing as a morally malleable starlet toying with working for the Reich.
Still, the real star was Kushner’s text, a message in a bottle. Witty, bitter, flamboyant, and emotionally grounded, the dialogue swings, delightfully, between intimate exchanges and grandiloquent soliloquies, capturing the vulnerability of idealists in the face of evil. When the Devil himself appeared, in a puff of smoke, the town-house alarm went off and the play paused. For a moment, it all seemed, surreally, to be part of the production: yet another alarm to ignore so that the show could go on. ♦