Other Desert Cities review – Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Ed Harris shine in timely Broadway revival

Ed Harris and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Other Desert Cities. Photograph: Emilio MadridView image in fullscreenEd Harris and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Other Desert Cities. Photograph: Emilio MadridReviewOther Desert Cities review – Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Ed Harris shine in timely Broadway revivalHudson Theatre, New YorkAllison Janney and Joe Keery co-star in a powerful drama about a family reunion turned political minefield

Just in time for the holidays, Jon Robin Baitz’s family reunion drama, Other Desert Cities, is back with an even starrier cast than its 2011 premiere. The revival is a headline-grabber for marking the stage debuts of Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Joe Keery, alongside the Broadway returns of Ed Harris, Allison Janney and Lily Rabe.

Read moreBut if this raises eyebrows as a takeover of Hollywood vanity, those concerns are easily quelled by the performances – especially those of the newcomers. John Benjamin Hickey’s staging is well attuned to its cast’s abilities, more than justifying its speedy return to Broadway. This Pulitzer finalist play still has a lot to say.

The question of what should be said is heavy on the Wyeth family’s mind, as daughter Brooke (Rabe) returns to her parents’ swank Palm Springs home for Christmas with a manuscript of her upcoming memoir.

It is 2004, and the public has mostly forgotten that one of the sons of this Republican dynasty – headed by Lyman (Harris) and Polly (Louis-Dreyfus), one-time Hollywood fixtures who followed their friends, the Reagans, into the more lucrative world of politics – was involved in a domestic terror attack before killing themselves.

His death steered the liberal Brooke off the tracks, but now she’s found some peace through the memoir and seeks her parents’ blessing to publish. That their peace is now threatened thrills Silda (Janney), Polly’s live-in sister and former writing partner, now a recovering alcoholic. She and Brooke share a righteous indignation that the family’s self-interest led to its collapse; a belief that’s aired in the memoir.

What these black sheep don’t care to admit is that their indulgence – in drink or pity or public excoriation – might be its own form of selfishness.

Brooke’s brother Trip (Keery) is a successful producer of reality TV with one foot out of the fight and a handful of flight options at the ready should tensions get too high. He’s too young to remember his brother’s death, so holds a different view of the family dynamics.

Louis-Dreyfus is impeccable, her turns to iciness genuinely chilling as a study of propriety in action; the venom she struggles to hold back seeping through her teeth. (She also looks great in Tom Broecker’s spot-on costumes, and in the first lady bob which hair-and-wig designer Robert Pickens gives her.)

View image in fullscreenLily Rabe, Joe Keery and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Other Desert Cities. Photograph: Emilio MadridWith his born star-gravitas and voice, Harris is the perfect patrician, which makes the cracks in his steeliness all the more heartbreaking. And Keery earns this season’s Alden Ehrenreich award for best revelation who should never leave the stage.

Janney is expectedly great in the role of a sardonic dame, though perhaps too innately lovable for a character who could benefit from darker shading. The similarly dependable Rabe, though alluring throughout, also tilts the scales toward this duo’s version of events, and both spend much of the play as essentially faultless characters.

This becomes an issue as more is revealed, and Brooke is already something of the play’s achilles heel. She’s continually, improbably shocked that a mother should be concerned about her daughter’s upcoming tell-all. When, by the second act, she is still puzzled that Polly hasn’t given her blessing, you wish she’d get with the program, and we’d get on with the show.

Those are all relatively minor quibbles, though. Baitz’s play is firmly of the grand “family reunion from hell” tradition, so if a few dominoes don’t slam as forcefully into the next, it’s no matter; we know they’ll all end up toppled. A decade and a half after its premiere, this revival makes a strong case for its ranking among the better of those, and a definitive one for its dissection of American rot – perhaps too eerily.

Read moreWritten during the US withdrawal from Iraq and reflecting on the slow stumble of disillusionment set off by the Vietnam war, Other Desert Cities has history on its mind. Baitz could never have predicted Trump’s rise to power, so the play’s jabs against Reagan and celebs turned politicians (the bread-and-butter of safe liberalism) now scan with calamitous prescience, even if it premiered within the relative safety of Obama’s third year in office.

But the play is set only a year after the Chicks had their music career derailed by anti-war comments, and still carries the feel of a current and potentially professionally harmful political missive that this country no longer dares to mount on its biggest stages.

Louis-Dreyfus and Janney built a large part of their legacies on television series with broadly appealing progressive leanings. Harris, the MVP in this regard, sat memorably stone-faced while red-scare abetter Elia Kazan received a standing ovation at the 1999 Oscars.

Other Desert Cities evokes his bold stance during that era’s intersection of culture and politics, but revivals inevitably invite comparisons between the now and then. The widespread backlash to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq are similar in how the nation’s artists responded to them with certainty and immediacy. No one was ever in favor of this latest war against Iran the way many were during Bush’s presidency. The question hovering over theater today: will anyone stage a play about the war we’re actually fighting?

Other Desert Cities is at the Hudson Theatre, New York, until 17 January