There are a few plays within Jon Robin Baitz’s drama “Other Desert Cities,” which reopened on Broadway last night, after a successful run earlier this year at Lincoln Center.
The show starts off as a corrosive dark comedy about a tumultuous Christmas reunion pitting conservative parents against their liberal offspring.
But then Baitz reveals a series of game-changers.
The hosting elders, Polly and Lyman Wyeth (Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach, both at the top of their game), are old-school California Republicans. They’ve segued from Hollywood careers to a posh Palm Springs retirement filled with fund-raisers and country-club brunches.
Visiting for the holidays are their children: Trip (Thomas Sadoski), a laidback producer of low-brow reality TV, and Brooke (Rachel Griffiths), a writer who’s just emerging from debilitating depression. They don’t look quite right in their parents’ chic, airy living room — John Lee Beatty’s set is appropriately sterile and sleek.
A Sag Harbor progressive with a rich woman’s blond highlights, Brooke derides her parents’ blue-blazer conservatism. And that’s nothing compared to her fury at the way they drove their oldest child, Henry, to drugs, extremism and suicide years ago. At least that’s how she sees it.
Watching from the sidelines, Trip and Silda (Judith Light), Polly’s recovering-alcoholic sister, referee the verbal volleys — which are particularly fast and furious between mother and daughter.
“You are never going to meet anyone if you continue to dress like a refugee from a library in Kabul,” Polly sniffs.
This part is a very good, if conventional, family dramedy, enlivened by Joe Mantello’s fluid direction and superb acting. Griffiths, in her Broadway debut, has a mellower presence than Elizabeth Marvel, who created the role months ago. You can really see her Brooke as the product of Lyman and Polly’s upbringing: obliviously entitled, with a crusader’s self-righteousness.
Griffiths doesn’t try to charm the audience by making Brooke sympathetic — which is key when the family bickering turns out to have been mere warning shots before a major explosion. And the detonator is Brooke’s upcoming tell-all memoir about Henry.
Suddenly, the play opens up. Now we’re dealing with an artist’s responsibilities and duties, with what makes up the truth, with the notion of appropriation. Predictably, a sunny character reveals a hidden malaise; a lot more interesting is that others reveal selfless generosity.
This is rich territory — the fraught relationship between Polly and Silda alone is worth a spinoff — but Baitz doesn’t clobber us with messages or psychobabble. He just makes spending time with these messed-up, complicated people a genuine pleasure.