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ther Desert Cities concerns the Wyeth family, two generations, parents and children, and the tumult that arises when daughter Brooke arrives for a Christmas gathering in Palm Springs toting the manuscript of a family memoir she has written. Parents, Polly and Lyman, are prominent California Republicans with ties going back to the Reagan years. Brother Trip has found success as a producer of a reality television show. Brooke, who has one published novel, has been struggling of late and the completed memoir represents the end of a long and unproductive period. However, her account of an episode from her youth alarms her parents who express serious reservations about publishing the book. The holiday weather outside may be delightful, but inside a tempest is brewing. “As an artist, I find this play poses very potent and troubling questions,” notes Tim Bond, who directs the production. “When is seeking the truth about family secrets off limits? Who determines what family stories get told? What is a writer’s responsibility to her family and to her art?” Bond expects the play to have great resonance with audience members. “I suspect nearly every family has secrets that have been deemed too dangerous or damaging to be spoken, let alone written about and made public,” he explains. “The consequences of maintaining family secrets or seeking to reveal explosive truths are seemingly catastrophic to the psychic survival of the family and its members.” In the play, Baitz addresses this dilemma in ways that are humorous and harrowing—much like family life. Other Desert Cities marked the debut of a Baitz play on Broadway, but he has a long and celebrated career as both a playwright and screenwriter. Baitz is one of the most produced living playwrights on American stages right now and stands among the most respected writers in the country, known for his well-crafted, powerful plays that have earned their place in the annals of American drama. At a recent production of Other Desert Cities at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, he spoke about his initial inspiration for this family drama, and the intersection of politics and personal life: Jon Robin Baitz: Initially, I was interested in all of the interconnected impasses that had occurred in American life and my own at the same time. Culturally in the time period – the play starts in 2004 – the smoke was starting to clear from the first moments of a long war, and sides were very vividly drawn in the country. There was a sense that there had been a sea change within the conservative movement and that there was a kind of nostalgia for the old Republicans – Reagan Republicans, and prior to that, Eisenhower Republicans. This new kind of conservatism is fascinating to me. It seems to be very aggressive and involve a lot of new language like “preemptive” and “unilateralism.” And I wondered how that had happened and I also wondered how the old Republicans were reacting to it. At the same time I was involved in figuring out my own relationship with California, which is my natural habitat – but one that I don’t have a very peaceful relationship with – and I started to see this play. The Palm Springs in the play is a kind of battleground, but a battleground at the end of
America, where all the promise of the West has been frozen in time. There were these anachronistic Americans living in a kind of cinematic library of old Hollywood movies, old versions of Western success. They were flitting around in my head, as was my own increasing anxiety about the role of the writer in the lives of others, and the responsibility that a writer has to himself and the people he loves. I had recently created and left a TV show – Brothers and Sisters – in Los Angeles, and sworn never to go back to that life, and I thought I’d try and do some of the things that Brothers and Sisters would not permit me to do: to write about the family as a narrative, and a certain kind of privileged America, which is acknowledged in the play. I strive to find the exact point in a narrative where the personal and the political intersect perfectly, because I find the two things completely inseparable. America is currently in a giant political debate, and you see a kind of war going on that’s actually a very old war. I’m trying to mirror that in the play. Our elections are about the soul of this country, which is what makes them so harrowing. It’s like every four years there’s open heart surgery here, and having had heart surgery I can’t conceive of doing it again and again throughout one’s life. I see the country as really broken, much as the family in the play is breaking.
APR. 8 - APR. 26 wed. APR 8 7:30 pm p thur. APR 9 7:30 pm p fri. APR 10 8 pm op sat. APR 11 3 pm, 8 pm sun. APR 12 2 pm pl wed. APR 15 2 pm o, w, 7:30 pm thur. APR 16 7:30 pm h fri. APR 17 8 pm sat. APR 18 3 pm pl,s, 8 pm sun. APR 19 2 pm, 7 pm d tues. APR 21 7:30 pm wed. APR 22 7:30 pm thur. APR 23 7:30 pm pl fri. APR 24 8 pm sat. APR 25 3 pm ad, 8 pm sun. APR 26 2 pm o p = preview op = opening d = discussion s = ASL interpreted o = open captioning ad = audio described h = happy hour pl = prologue w = Wed@1
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