Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities Gets a New Home at Lincoln Center

Playwright Jon Robin Baitz upcoming play Other Desert Cities (formerly called Love and Mercy) will be produced at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater instead of at a Broadway theater as originally planned, according to The New York Times. Cities would have marked Baitz’s (The Substance of Fire, A Fair Country) Broadway debut. Performances are scheduled to begin December 16 ahead of an opening night on January 13, 2011, with Joe Mantello directing.

“I’m very comfortable there at Lincoln Center, and I don’t know much else,” Baitz said. “It felt like one less pressure to put on myself, instead of trying to work in a very specific arena which seems to be dictated by the presence of stars. I wasn’t sure if that was an added pressure that I wanted.”

The play, which takes place over the course of a Christmas Eve in Palm Springs, centers on a one-time matinee idol-turned-politician, his screenwriter wife and their novelist daughter. Other Desert Cities explores the limits of parental love and filial duty, our myth-making culture and the claim we have on our own biography when it involves the invasion of privacy of others.