OLT Scores With Other Desert Cities
Photo: Maria Vartanova
It was Tolstoy who famously observed that all happy families resemble one another — but that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
So keeping this in mind, what are we to make of the dysfunctional household on view in Ottawa Little Theatre’s sterling production of Jon Robin Baitz’s 2011 play, Other Desert Cities?
On the surface, things might seem okay when we’re first exposed to the Palm Springs home of Lyman and Polly Wyeth, with characters arriving through the French doors, cheerful and tired after tennis, and engaging in the kind of easy banter that you might expect with a Christmas family gathering. But there’s something not quite right about this Yuletide bonhomie. It’s a virtue of Geoff Gruson’s discerning production that you sense a forced artificiality in the things being said and you’re also aware of an underlying tension because of things left unsaid.
This is tricky to bring off, particularly with a script burdened with exposition challenges in its first section. But Gruson has a cast capable of facing these pitfalls as it proceeds to define characters who will increase in complexity as their worlds begin to unravel.
Baitz is clearly presenting this troubled desert household as a metaphor for wider divisions threatening to fracture the American Dream. And although it’s set in 2003, his fine play provides a portent of the shape of things to come — so it has a particular timeliness in being staged on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Lyman and Polly Wyeth are stalwart defenders of the American Right. He’s a former actor turned Reagan-era diplomat. She’s a former Hollywood screenwriter so stubborn in her political convictions that she can view a surprise visit of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq as a wonderful Christmas present for the troops trapped in that Middle East quagmire.
OLT mainstay Jane Morris plays Polly, a role fraught with ambushes for any performer attempting it. And if Polly seems not quite true in those early scenes, it’s because the character is not quite true. This Polly — calculatedly mannered and emotionally guarded — is seasoned by her years of navigating her way through the secrets and lies of Tinseltown. She knows how to put on an act. But, as we shall see, the brittle mask will slip, and eventually the fault lines will begin ripping through her carefully sustained world and its accompanying fictions.
The person who forces the tensions out of hiding is the couple’s daughter, Brooke. She and brother Trip, a successful television producer, are home for the holidays. Trip, portrayed here with insight and conviction by Phillip Merriman, is the most “together” member of the family circle. This is in contrast to Brooke: it soon becomes evident that it is her presence that is generating the unease and has her parents walking on eggshells.
Brooke is a gifted writer recovering from a devastating depression. Venetia Lawless’s performance offers unsettling glimpses of the fragility beneath the forced gaiety — glimpses sufficient to make other family members still fear that she could again crash at any moment. But beyond the raw nerves and volatile emotions, Lawless also gives us a ravaged but still steely determination. Brooke has successfully completed a new book — one that has found a publisher and also attracted the attention of The New Yorker magazine. It promises to boost her faltering sense of self worth. This goes beyond the artistic — its publication will also restore her belief in her possibilities as a human being.
Trouble is — it’s a personal memoir about a horrifying tragedy involving her oldest brother Henry, a tragedy rooted in long-ago protests against the Vietnam war.
It’s the emergence of this manuscript that throws the family into convulsions, fracturing those carefully tended facades of normality and forcing a confrontation with uncomfortable truths. And those truths will threaten the fragile Brooke as well as her compromised parents. Yet, this is compassionate theatre: as a playwright, Jon Robin Baitz may eschew the easy ending, but he is also a humane artist — far more so than, say, Edward Albee, a dramatist capable of attacking family certainties mercilessly.
At OLT, Gruson and his cast manage a taut emotional rhythm that thoroughly engages our attention by the play’s conclusion. And the performances across the board are responsive to the needs of the material. Although her initial entrance lacks impact, Cheryl Jackson settles confidently into the role of a knowing but alcoholic sister. And Robert Hicks, in the difficult role of the retired ambassador, Lyman Wyeth, brings out the anguish of a man whose years navigating the difficult waters of diplomacy in no way prepare him for the personal minefield opening before him this Christmas Eve. The man’s vulnerability is palpable.
The play works well on the OLT”s proscenium stage — so well that you find yourself questioning London’s Old Vic Theatre in its decision a couple of years ago to do Other Desert Cities in the round. That production sought to bring more immediacy and intimacy to the material — and didn’t really succeed, given the Old Vic’s yawning expanses. At OLT, there is no such problem, and the material is further strengthened by Andrew Hamlin’s outstanding set: anyone knowing the desert architecture of Palm Springs and adjoining cities will applaud his achievement. This is serious, rewarding theatre.
Other Desert Cities
By Jon Robin Baitz
An Ottawa Little Theatre production to Jan. 28.
Director: Geoff Gruson
Set Design: Andrew Hamlin
Sound: Bradford MacKinlay
Lighting: John Solman
Props: Stephanie Beaulne
Costumes: Rachel Hauraney
Venetia Lawless: Brooke Wyeth
Jane Morris: Polly Wyeth
Robert Hicks: Lyman Wyeth
Phillip Merriman: Trip Wyeth
Cheryl Jackson: Silda Grauman