Stockard Channing, Stacy Keach, Linda Lavin & Elizabeth Marvel Set for Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities at LCT

Stockard Channing, Stacy Keach, Linda Lavin and Elizabeth Marvel will star in Lincoln Center Theater’s forthcoming off-Broadway premiere of Other Desert Cities by Jon Robin Baitz. The play will begin previews on December 16 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater and will open in January 13, 2011, directed by Joe Mantello.

In Other Desert Cities, Brooke Wyeth (Marvel), a once promising novelist, returns home after a six year absence to celebrate Christmas in Palm Springs with her parents (Channing and Keach), former members of the Reagan inner circle, her brother (as yet uncast) and her aunt (Lavin). When Brooke announces that she is about to publish a memoir focusing on an explosive chapter in the family’s history, the holiday reunion is thrown into turmoil as the Wyeths struggle to come to terms with their past.

Channing is a Tony winner for Joe Egg and was nominated for Tonys for Pal Joey, The Lion in Winter, Four Baboons Adoring the Sun, Six Degrees of Separation and The House of Blue Leaves. Other New York theater credits include Hapgood, The Rink, Woman in Mind and The Golden Age. On television, she received two Emmy Awards for The West Wing.

Keach received a Tony nomination for Indians and most recently appeared on Broadway in The Kentucky Cycle. He starred in Hamlet, Peer Gynt and Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and toured in Barnum and Frost/Nixon.

Lavin most recently appeared on Broadway in Collected Stories, for which she received a 2010 Best Actress Tony nomination. A Tony winner for Broadway Bound, she was also nominated for her performances in The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, The Diary of Anne Frank and The Last of the Red Hot Lovers. At LCT, she has starred in The New Century and The Sisters Rosensweig.

Marvel, who is currently starring in New Yokr Theatre Workshop’s off-Broadway revival of The Little Foxes, has appeared on Broadway in Top Girls, Seascape, An American Daughter, Taking Sides and Saint Joan and off-Broadway in A Secondhand Memory, Hedda Gabler, Lydie Breeze, A Streetcar Named Desire and Therese Raquin.

Baitz returns to Lincoln Center Theater, where his plays A Fair Country and Ten Unknowns premiered and where The Substance of Fire enjoyed an extended run He was most recently represented on the New York stage with the 2005 off-Broadway production of The Paris Letter and created the TV show Brothers & Sisters.

Other Desert Cities will have sets by John Lee Beatty, costumes by David Zinn, lighting by Kenneth Posner, sound by Jill BC DuBoff and original music by Justin Ellington.