Brooke Wyeth, a once promising novelist, returns home after a six year absence to celebrate Christmas in Palm Springs with her parents, former members of the Reagan inner circle, her brother and her aunt. When Brooke announces 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.
What Is the Story of Other Desert Cities?
Set in Palm Springs over Christmas weekend, Other Desert Cities centers on the powerful Wyeth family. Patriarch Lyman, an actor-turned-ambassador during the Reagan administration, and matriarch Polly, a former screenwriter, are set to celebrate the holidays with their adult children. Without informing her parents, daughter Brooke Wyeth, a once-promising novelist, has written a memoir exposing painful family secrets. Her brother, Trip, the creator of a hit TV reality series, tries to stay out of the crossfire as their alcoholic aunt, Polly’s sister Silda, eggs Brooke on. In a series of confrontations, the Wyeths sift through conflicting memories of the past and face serious choices about how to go forward.
"We've all heard this scenario before: Family members gather for a fraught holiday reunion in which embarrassing family secrets – lubricated by booze and resentment – tumble out. But Jon Robin Baitz has taken that cliche and somehow made it vibrant in Other Desert Cities.... The script crackles with life and so do the performances. "
Associated Press
Mark Kennedy
"Like all the great desert tribes of antiquity, Palm Springs Republicans deserve their own sacred text. Jon Robin Baitz, a gay liberal humanist, has delivered them a doozy with Other Desert Cities, his off-Broadway hit, which has now ripened admirably on Broadway. Power, passion, and superbly crafted palaver stippled with blowdarts of wit—this is what Baitz (The Substance of Fire, TV’s Brothers and Sisters) does best. "
New York Magazine
Scott Brown
"All family reunions should be this satisfying. Having spent months apart and suffered losses that might have leveled a less resilient clan, the Wyeths of Other Desert Cities have reassembled on Broadway at the Booth Theater, and absence and adversity (as they’re supposed to but so seldom do) have made them closer than ever. This means they have even more power to nurture, delight and wound one another and, not incidentally, move to tears anyone who visits them. Cities, directed with a masterly combination of shadow and shimmer by Joe Mantello, emerges as stronger, more sincere and more credible in its Broadway reincarnation."
The New York Times
Ben Brantley