Theatre in Review: Other Desert Cities (Booth Theatre)

	Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach. Photo: Joan Marcus

Christmas has come early on Broadway this year, as the members of the spectacularly troubled Wyeth family are once again convening for a holiday filled with zingers, recriminations, and the unearthing of some shattering secrets. It's a pleasure to report that, following last season's run at the Mitzi Newhouse Theatre, the Lincoln Center Theatre production of Other Desert Cities has transferred to Broadway, and, if anything, is in better shape than ever.

Set during the 2004 Christmas holidays -- with the Iraqi war steadily unraveling and America still panicked over terrorism -- the action unfolds in the Palm Springs home of Polly and Lyman Wyeth, ex-Hollywood royalty and Republican Party stalwarts. He was a tough-guy movie star ("Nobody at Warner Brothers ever died like me") turned Reagan-era ambassador; she ground out scripts for a Gidget-style series of features, then became the perfect political wife, attending fundraisers and lunching with the likes of Nancy Reagan and Betsy Bloomingdale. The Jewish Polly has also acquired a perfect WASP manner along the way, much to the irritation of Silda, her sister and former collaborator, a boozing old lefty with a genius for self-sabotage, who, having hit the skids, has moved in for an indefinite period of time. Joining them for the holidays are Brooke, their daughter, a blocked novelist who has been hospitalized for depression, and Trip, their son, the cheerful producer of an egregious TV reality series.

It's a volatile collection of personalities under any circumstances, but things really get ugly when Brooke announces that, instead of a new novel, she has written a memoir indicting her parents for their treatment of their eldest child, who drifted into drugs and radical politics. As she sees it, their callous treatment of the young man, following his involvement in a bombing that claimed an innocent bystander, drove him to suicide. A pre-publication excerpt in The New Yorker is in the offing, and Lyman and Polly, who have spent decades living down this tragedy, are suddenly faced with unwanted notoriety and the resuscitation of savagely painful memories.

There's nothing quite like the experience of an audience listening -- really listening, in a profound hush, as if its collective life depended on each word. It doesn't happen every day, but you can count on it eight times a week at the Booth right now, as the Wyeths' ritual (and very funny) sniping gives way to furious confrontations and the ripping open of wounds that have never truly healed. Topping it off is a stunning revelation that, in all likelihood, will send you scrambling to revise everything you think about this embattled clan.

As was the case Off Broadway, Jon Robin Baitz's dialogue packs plenty of malicious hilarity. Polly, loving mother that she is, doesn't mind telling Brooke that she is "dressed like a refugee from a library in Kabul." Silda, fed up with Polly's sniping, remarks, "I'm going to have to learn to deal with you now that I'm sober." And there's Silda's treasurable comment that "Palm Springs isn't a refuge; it's King Tut's tomb. The whole town is filled with mummies with tans."

This time around -- partly, I think, because of some canny recasting -- it's even easier to grasp the exposed nerve endings underneath the family's acidly hilarious repartee. Trip, responding to Brooke's complaint that he hasn't made her face-off with Polly and Lyman any easier, says, "This should be the hardest decision you ever have to make," adding that it is high time she stopped feeling that her battles with depression have ennobled in her any way. (This is one charge to which Brooke has no answer.) Polly, forced to recall the horrors she thought she buried years ago, says, with a palpable ache, "It wasn't politics he was protesting -- it was us." Polly also makes the chilling observation that "families are terrorized by their weakest member." Exactly who that person is in this household is something you can find yourself debating far into the night.

The two new members of the cast are crucial in this regard. Rachel Griffiths' Brooke is more vulnerable and more emotionally fragile than was Elizabeth Marvel, her predecessor. Marvel, in an extremely memorable turn, gave as good as she got; here, you believe that Brooke, if thwarted, might tumble back into the hospital ward at any moment, a decision that ups the dramatic stakes considerably. Judith Light's Silda, who has her own reasons for wanting to see Brooke's memoir published, is more ravaged and more driven than her predecessor, Linda Lavin (who brought all of her signature strengths to the role), but is no less lacking in wicked wit. Responding to Polly's observation that her so-called Pucci blouse is a fake, Silda, fed up with Polly's goyish airs, replies, "This Pucci is a lot more real than your Pat Buckley shtick."

As before, Stockard Channing's Polly is a hot mess of trouble in a Chanel suit, incapable of censoring herself, even if it means driving her loved ones around the bend. It's a tricky role, to say the least, but if there's an American actress more adept at infusing high comedy hilarity with a vein of deep feeling, I've never seen her. Stacy Keach's Lyman is a conservative lion in winter, trying to hold onto the remains of his family at any price; his animal cry of pain and fury when, at long last, he must reveal the truth he's concealed for decades, is hard to shake. Thomas Sadoski's Trip is an elegant piece of dramatic striptease, as, bit by bit, he sheds his genial exterior to reveal the scar tissue underneath. (As he notes, it's hard to be happy when the only people you truly love count among their numbers an alcoholic, a suicide, and a professional basket case.)

Also returning is John Lee Beatty's wickedly amusing California modern living room set, with its stone walls, white furniture, and matching artificial Christmas tree. Kenneth Posner's superb lighting includes such telling details as the ripple of reflected water on the ceiling, and the hints of a Technicolor sunset outside. David Zinn's costumes define each character with notable insight. Jill BC DuBoff's sound design is typically professional.

In its canny assessment of the internal workings of a dysfunctional family and its mordant appreciation of how the tentacles of the Vietnam-era culture wars reach up to the present moment, Other Desert Cities represents by far the most skillful fusion of domestic drama and political commentary in Baitz's body of work. This one has it all -- complex characters, sparkling dialogue, and cast-iron dramatic construction, especially in a second act that consists of a series of knockout punches. Too my mind, it's the best new American play since August: Osage County. --David Barbour