If you’re going to a Jon Robin Baitz play, prepare to go into battle (so to speak). From The Substance of Fire and A Fair Country to the current revival of Other Desert Cities at the Hudson Theatre, his characters are constantly clashing over something. Politics, artistic integrity, morality—the biggies. Fortunately, these are only wars of words, and everyone is well-armed.
On its sun-soaked surface, Other Desert Cities looks like your average dysfunctional-family drama. Mentally fragile daughter Brooke (Lily Rabe) returns to her parents’ Palm Springs oasis—the groovy midcentury modern set is by Scott Pask—for Christmas, with a tell-all memoir manuscript in tow, and unleashes a firestorm of long-simmering resentments, buried secrets, and hot-headed left vs. right debates.
But Baitz doesn’t do average—everything rises and falls on razor-sharp dialogue and cunningly crafted scenes. There are no drunken outbursts, and no one sends food flying. And what if I told you that you’re likely to end up siding with a pair of glossy Reagan republicans who say things like “chink food” and fully back the war in Iraq? The year, incidentally, is 2004.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
It would be so easy to villainize the perky Polly (Seinfeld alum and Veep MVP Julia Louis-Dreyfus), with her bouncy chin-length bob, and the square-jawed Lyman (Ed Harris, sounding eerily like Tony Goldwyn on Scandal…not a bad thing), a movie star turned GOP chair turned ambassador. Long before she became a political wife, Polly wrote a series of Gidget-esque movies with her sister, Silda (Allison Janney); but once Hollywood became about “drugs and lefties whining,” as Polly says, she bowed out. (We’re not quite sure what Silda became, other than a hard drinker; she’s now living with Polly and Lyman after her recent stint in rehab. “The woman’s liver needs a liver,” sighs Polly.) Neither hesitates to criticize Brooke: Lyman comments on her “abhorrent and repugnant lefty politics”; Polly tells her she dresses “like a refugee from a library in Kabul.” Even her manner of speech is grist for Polly: “I think living on the East Coast has given you the impression that sarcasm is alluring and charming. It is not. Sarcasm is the purview of teenagers and homosexuals.”
Caught in the middle of all of this—though he refuses to play referee—is son Trip (the excellent Joe Keery), who produces a reality TV show called Jury of Your Peers, a sort of “courtroom of the stars” series with D-listers pandering and delivering small-claims verdicts. (I wouldn’t be surprised if you see it on TLC soon, sandwiched between Dr. Pimple Popper and Double Lives of Suburban Wives.) He does his best to temper the political talk, lest the days “dissolve into stiff upper-lipped thermonuclear family war.” But when Brooke naively presents her book like a Christmas gift, declaring that it’s about her brother Henry—her best friend, her idol—who killed himself, even he decides to knock his sister down a peg or two. “You think being a depressive makes you special?” he asks. “Guess what, being depressed makes you banal.”
Rabe doesn’t hesitate to make Brooke snotty, entitled, and infuriating: Is she really so naive that she thought this book, which apparently blames her parents for Henry’s drug use and eventual demise, and accuses their high-placed republican friends of who knows what, wouldn’t destroy Polly and Lyman? When Harris looks at her, registering his disappointment—“I only had a little bit of my heart left intact after we lost Henry, and what’s left is breaking”—your heart will break too.
It takes Louis-Dreyfus a few minutes to burn off the nervous energy, but she soon finds Polly’s wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing personality. (Stockard Channing, who originated the role in 2011, was a decidedly more venomous Polly.) Meanwhile, in the role that won Judith Light a Tony Award, Janney is exactly as you’d expect. If you watched her play a wisecracking recovering alcoholic for eight seasons on the sitcom Mom, you know precisely how she’s playing a wisecracking recovering alcoholic here—only now she’s doing it in a fabulous pink muumuu courtesy of costume designer Tom Broecker.
One can’t help but imagine Janney and Louis-Dreyfus pulling a switcheroo, a la Laura Linney and Cynthia Nixon in 2017’s The Little Foxes, so Janney could take on the cool, passive-aggressive Polly and Louis-Dreyfus could make a Selina Meyer–style meal out of Silda’s one-liners (e.g., “I have more Nazi dreams than Elie Wiesel”). But that setup is probably too obvious, with Janney having played Channing’s role in the Six Degrees of Separation Broadway revival.
Baitz writes such brilliant women that one can’t help but wonder when we’ll see something new from him. For the past few years, he’s been entrenched in the Ryan Murphyverse, developing and writing for TV series including the glam true-life tale Feud: Capote and the Swans and the so-bad-it’s-good high-seas “medical drama” Doctor Odyssey. Oh, and so-bad-it’s-truly-bad All’s Fair, starring, among a powerhouse female cast, Kim Kardashian. Does she have any idea how lucky she is?
Other Desert Cities opened Oct. 18, 2026, at the Hudson Theatre and runs through Jan. 17, 2027. Tickets and information: otherdesertcitiesbroadway.com
