Other Desert Cities review: Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Allison Janneys play has laughs, but no bite
Two and a half hours, with one intermission.At the Hudson Theatre.“Other Desert Cities,” like so many plays, is about a family with issues, to say the very least.A free-spirited Manhattan writer named Brooke jets to sunny Palm Springs to visit her well-to-do mom, dad, TV actor brother and leftist aunt for Christmas.
She’s very New York, they’re very California circa 2004.Her buttoned-up Republican parents were close friends of Ronald and Nancy Reagan from their days working alongside them in Hollywood — mom as a screenwriter with her sister, and dad as an actor like Ronnie.Now, their downcast daughter has brought along a surprise lump of coal as a present: galleys of her new memoir, which airs their dirtiest laundry.Those toxic pages have the potential to destroy them.But the likeable enough Broadway revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s sharp-tongued drama, which opened Sunday night at the Hudson Theatre, takes these people’s competing personalities way too far.
Quite by accident, everybody in this midcentury modern home — not just Brooke — becomes the black sheep.Director John Benjamin Hickey’s discordant production starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Allison Janney, Ed Harris, Joe Keery and Lily Rabe fails to click when it’s anything more than one person tossing off mean zingers.Each actor has their moments, most are fine and one is excellent.
Not for a second, however, does anybody believe that the Wyeths are a real family or something other than an impressive assemblage of celebrities.Making her Broadway debut, Louis-Dreyfus has the toughest assignment as Polly, one of those viperous, monster mothers that are a hallmark of the American theater.The formidable Stockard Channing played her on Broadway last time, and I saw Deanna Dunagan of “August: Osage County” don the tennis dress in Chicago 13 years ago.Louis-Dreyfus has the requisite comic chops, obviously.
She is one of the greatest funnywomen of all time.And you can understand why they’d cl...