Steve Noll
Deborah Hearst and Peggy Rosin.
It’s Christmas time, with lights-a-twinkling, music-a-playing, mothers-a-nagging and eyes-a-rolling. At least, that’s how the Wyeths are spending their Christmas Eve in the opening scene of Other Desert Cities.
Madison Theatre Guild’s rendition of Jon Robin Baitz’s Broadway play, onstage at the Bartell through Nov. 23, gives the impression that it’s one of the many family-focused holiday comedies. But as the plot inches slowly but surely toward the climax, it becomes clear that this play’s message is no laughing matter.
Brooke Wyeth (Deborah Hearst) is a highly successful travel writer from New York City who flies home to Southern California’s Palm Springs in 2004, visiting her family for the holidays in the wake of her recent divorce and the country’s war on Iraq. Left-leaning Brooke comes from a Jewish and devoutly Republican family, save for her politically neutral brother, Trip (Michael Delaney White), who is constantly trying to keep the peace whenever Brooke makes a crack about “weapons of mass destruction” or her parents’ “fascist country club.”
But even in brief moments of peace — as Brook’s mother Polly (Judy Kimball), father Lyman (Joel Davidson) and recovering-alcoholic-aunt Silda (Peggy Rosin) reminisce about their careers as Hollywood actors — there are hints of tension and very real pain whenever Brooke tries to bring up her older brother, whose absence seems to haunt the family like a poltergeist carrying an unspeakable secret.
Conversations really heat up when Brooke reveals plans to publish a memoir, Love and Mercy, which tells the story of Brooke’s battle with manic depression and dark secrets about her parents and older sibling.
Other Desert Cities may mask itself as a dramedy, but it is full of intense, emotional and heartbreaking twists. It unapologetically confronts not only hot-button political topics but also the limits of love and loneliness.
Every actor in this production, directed by Betty Diamond, has dialogue with screeching octaves and lines that cut like a knife. But a special round of applause is due to Hearst, whose frustration and desperation builds up to an emotional explosion in the second act that shakes the walls of the Bartell. No one is holding back in this play, and it makes the tragic story of the Wyeths almost unbearably real.
Brooke’s book holds the secret to the play’s overarching question: Do we face life’s trials head on by revisiting the terrors of the past, no matter how heated or unpleasant? Or do we live in ignorance and bliss, steering the wheel toward that easier exit to “Other Desert Cities”?
