Other Desert Cities Scribe Jon Robin Baitz on His Journey From Theater to TV and Back

About the author:
On any list of the best American playwrights of the past 25 years, Jon Robin Baitz would be near the top. From his first NYC production, 1988’s The Film Society, starring Nathan Lane, Baitz has attracted the finest actors, including Ron Rifkin and Sarah Jessica Parker (The Substance of Fire), Judith Ivey (A Fair Country) and Donald Sutherland and Julianna Margulies (Ten Unknowns). His hyper-articulate dialogue and drama-packed family confrontations (frequently involving strong female characters) also attracted Hollywood’s attention, with unhappy results—particularly for theater fans, who missed him when he departed from the east coast to create TV’s Brothers & Sisters. The great news is that Baitz is back with the juicy new play Other Desert Cities, now in previews at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater starring Stockard Channing, Stacy Keach, Linda Lavin, Elizabeth Marvel and Thomas Sadoski. In a typically self-effacing essay for Broadway.com, Baitz describes the crisis he went through after leaving New York and shares the welcome news that he’s back in the theater to stay. 

I don’t know much anymore. I used to know so much about it all: politics, art, life, lust, despair, hunger. I could go on bullshitting about process, about how you write a play in your head before it is written, etc. But instead I am going to tell a little story I know about what happens when you try to become someone you are not.

So, by 2006, the playwright in question is feeling a little burnt out, wondering if he ran sort of dry. In August of that year, a friend of his, a producer/director, calls from the West Coast with an offer to write a pilot. It gets shot, picked up, shot again, and he is down the rabbit hole, making a TV show in sun-baked Burbank. A year later, he has been informally ejected from said TV show, partially of his own doing, and partly because his sensibility has diverged dramatically from that of the network. It is suggested he take a break.

Exhausted and dispirited, the playwright limps back to the east coast, and as the Writers’ Strike of 2007 begins, sits down to write a play, and abruptly realizes that he has forgotten how. Some people can go back and forth easily, fluidly between writing for Hollywood and being a playwright. The playwright realizes he is not one of them. And incidentally he is probably having what used to be called "a breakdown." He can no longer stand anything. He is blogging dangerously about his own Herzog-esque life, the strike negotiations, lashing out, demanding to be heard, even going so far as to wondering how the various studio heads (including the one who produces his TV show) could take money from writers and still look their kids in the eye. He angers nameless friends whom he has unthinkingly written of, exploding small bombs furiously. He is formally fired from his TV show. He is heartbroken and relieved. The thing that is polluted will not be the thing that makes him rich. The playwright has an antipathy towards getting rich from work he is not proud of. He feels that such acts ruin writers. Turn them hard and old. Maybe it was exhaustion and sorrow that the TV show would never be what he conjured; a vivid, funny argument about the American political tensions of our time, filtered through the lens of family.

He spends the quiet winter in a little town out on the eastern part of Long Island, and tries to figure out who he is. Starts a play. It crumbles in his hands. He thinks he should be in a beautiful hospital, high up in the Alps, staring out at snowy peaks, and reading Thomas Mann. He is encouraged to go back to work by the people who love him the most. He rereads Stoppard, Hare, Shaw, Pinter, Bennett, Gray, etc. He starts to feel the muscle memory coming back. Sketches some scenes. He remembers that the act of writing a play tells you a lot about who you are and what you believe in. Plays make you argue and see, make you stand up and take notice of your surroundings. Plays demand energy and rigor of their authors.

He starts making lists of plays, of subjects, of worlds he is engaged by. The list grows longer and longer, and one day, he looks at it and spots an early note about the inadvertent power of the writer to inflict pain. The note goes on to mention family secrets being co-opted, exploited, and purloined. He is sitting on a beach reading this note, and everything comes together. An elderly woman walks by him, and he thinks suddenly of glamorous Patricia Buckley, late wife of conservative icon William Buckley, and because his brain is starting to work again, and because he no longer feels encumbered by the constraints of network television, he feels free to play. That, he realizes, is what playwriting is all about. It is about being alone, and dreaming, and connecting dots, making leaps. It is about invention and bravery and a lack of self consciousness.

He thinks about the woman on the beach, who reminds him of Pat Buckley. He knows her, deep in his bones; he knows everything about her. He can feel her. Her history, while made up by the playwright, is perfectly valid. She is one of the old ones, rationalizers who are keeping silent while the GOP, which she mostly votes for based on fiscal reasons, has become progressively more and more grotesque. On the beach, watching this very handsome woman, the playwright muses idly on the ways in which the conservative movement has changed in his lifetime, how cruel it has become, riddled as it is with zealotry and pitchfork brigades. And he starts making notes about California too, his natural habitat, but the place he fled. What happened to California, her collapse, mirrors that of the writer in the play he begins to work on, mirrors that of the golden California dream of endless ease and peace. He sets it under the crushing white hot sun of Palm Springs, a place he has loved since childhood, location of some of his happiest family memories.

After many drafts, with many yet to come, at precisely 11:59 on December 31st of 2009, he has a draft, sits in silence for a bit and then wanders to a party next door, feeling alive for the first time in years. He has a drink and some caviar, and quietly tells people who care, that he has written “The End.”

When I caught up to him, he had finished the first draft of another play, and was determined to go back to the habits of his youth; to write a play a year, until he could no longer do so, and to remain in his adopted city of New York, close to theaters and friends. I wished him luck and went on my way. He went on to rehearsal, marveling at the strange alchemy of putting up a play. The mineral level on which so many elements converge. The dreams of the author with those of the director, mingling with the comprehensive power of actors to conjure unseen worlds under carefully placed lights, in carefully built clothes. After having been absent for half a decade, to him, the interactions of all of these energies was nothing short of magic. He had felt that way 25 years prior, when he moved to New York for a life in the theater.

The writer's life is hard and cold and then not. It is painful, slow, nerve wracking. Engines misfire, machinery breaks down, and you have to tough it out, keep going, and keep moving forward.

That's all I know.