Be grateful if the worst that happens to you this Christmas is burnt pavlova and an occasional heated argument about asylum seekers with your father. For the Wyeth family, in Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities, politics is at the shallow end of their argument pool.
It’s 2002 and Brooke Wyeth (Rebecca Davis) returns from the east coast to the family home in California, post-breakdown and post-9/11. Reunited with brother Trip (Conrad Coleby), parents Polly (Janet Andrewartha) and Lyman (Robert Coleby) – that rare and near-extinct breed of old Hollywood Republicans – and a fresh-out-of-rehab Aunt Silda (Vivienne Garrett), initial sparring on a tennis court spills over into the sunken lounge of the Wyett’s lush, Palm Springs home, where wall to floor windows expose everything and the light catches everyone. It’s not long before fights delve deeper than the War on Terror, with Brooke insistent her family approve her new work – a memoir dragging up a shared tragedy that Polly and Lyman are all too willing to forget.
Baitz has been working as a playwright since the mid-Eighties, but more recently spent several years as creator and executive producer of the hit ABC family drama Brothers and Sisters. As director Kate Cherry explains, here Baitz uses the family, not unlike Arthur Miller before him, as a metaphor for the state of his country and as a tool to discuss, among other things, conservatism stretching from Reagan to Bush and to Bush again, addiction, depression and betrayal of identity. There’s a lot going on and Baitz has overburdened these characters with details crammed into brief monologues. Like a thumping TV hangover, it’s as if he has written these characters to go to series, their destiny unfulfilled in two acts alone.
Unsurprisingly, when it made the leap to Broadway in 2011, Other Desert Cities employed actors known mostly for their TV and film work – Rachel Griffiths, Stockard Channing and Judith Light among the cast. There are a few familiar faces in this co-production too – most notably Janet Andrewartha, a former Neighbours matriarch who delivers arguably the most resonant performance of the play. Despite issues with her distracting dialect, a puzzling muddle as a Jewish Texan-turned-wannabe WASP, her timing, particularly her comic timing, is quite something, and she’s at her best in scenes with sister Silda, played with palpable empathy by Vivienne Garrett.
Robert Coleby has the reserve and great hair of a Reagan-era ambassador and his real-life son Conrad makes a pleasantly surprising Trip – his accent never falters and when you least expect, he delivers some of the most honest lines of the play with aplomb. While Rebecca Davis does her best with the wildly frustrating Brooke, she veers all too often from ‘30-something battling the demons of her upbringing’ into locked-door moody teen territory.
Before anyone even sets foot on stage there is already murmuring in the audience about the set and Christine Smith’s notes in the program reveal just how much she’s thought about the design of the Wyeth’s lounge – the distance it creates between characters, offering sly hints of their past. In a gorgeous collaboration, lighting designer Trent Suidgeest only enhances the space by creating dancing patterns of light, using the imposing glass walls to reflect the actors as apparitions, trailing a few paces behind.
Other Desert Cities never recovers from a disappointing second act and though at one point we are lectured in ‘fear’ – how it compels us to masquerade, to hide – the play’s big reveal lacks challenge, bravery. When it comes there is no gasping from the crowd. It’s deflating, unworthy of what came before. Just as the family accuse Brooke of putting art before reality, the play seems to choose a similar path. It chooses melodrama, never dull, no time wasted, but all the while drifting away from a truth it initially seemed so keen to explore.
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Queensland Theatre Company and Black Swan State Theatre Company presents
Other Desert Cities
By Jon Robin Baitz
Directed by Kate Cherry
Set Designer: Christina Smith
Lighting Designer: Trent Suidgeest
Sound Designer: Tony Brumpton
Cast: Janet Andrewartha, Conrad Coleby, Robert Coleby, Rebecca Davis and Vivienne Garrett
Playhouse, Queensland Performing Arts Centre
10 August – 1 September
