Other Desert Cities

This opulent set design by Christina Smith must be one of the most beautiful created in recent years. It is the Wyeths’ Palm Springs mansion where the family are gathered for a Christmas reunion.

Like similar reunions the play opens slowly, but quickly we discover the cracks appearing in the façade of this glamour family. Author-daughter Brooke (Rebecca David) has returned after living for six years at Sag Harbour, bearing the final draft of a family memoir containing details of an event during the first Iraq war that had a profound emotional effect on her.

This catalyst rips open the Wyeth family’s recent history when both parents were insiders during the Regan regime.

Janet Andrewartha as mother Polly, tries passionately to hold the family together and prevent magazine articles that could expose influential political connections. She negotiates passionately with Brook and her TV-producer brother, Trip (Conrad Coleby), Silda, Polly’s alcohol and drug recuperating sister who worked on sections of the book with Brook (Vivienne Garrett), and husband Lyman (Robert Coleby) to try to suppress publication until she and Lyman are deceased. Brook sticks to her artistic commitment. We are left to imagine the social and political fall-out.

There is not a weak link in this cast.

Other Desert Cities is a fine piece of dramatic literature. To my mind, Baitz could be a 21^st century Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams, in the way he portrays an era and its political and social mores through interactions in one family.

Jay McKee

Image: Rebecca Davis and Janet Andrewartha & Robert Coleby and Rebecca Davis. Photography: Gary Marsh Photography

Link to Kimberley Shaw's review of Perth season.