OTHER DESERT CITIES Delivers Powerful Family Drama at Theatre Artists Studio

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The production runs through September 27th at Theatre Artists Studio in Phoenix, AZ.

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There's a particular kind of play that looks, for its first twenty minutes, like it's going to be a comfortable Christmas-in-Palm-Springs comedy. Wisecracks over cocktails. A little generational sniping. And then it suddenly reveals itself to be a demolition. OTHER DESERT CITIES , Theatre Artists Studio's season opener, skillfully directed by Tom Koelbel, is that play.

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The setup is simple enough: Brooke Wyeth comes home to her parents' Palm Springs house for Christmas, six years after a breakdown, and tells them she's written a memoir, about to be published, that reopens the family's most carefully buried subject: the death of her older brother Henry, who was involved with a radical political group in the '70s and reportedly died by suicide after a bombing connected to the group killed someone. Her father Lyman is a former actor and Reagan-era ambassador; her mother Polly is a former screenwriter and hardline conservative; her aunt Silda is Polly's live-in sister and a recovering alcoholic; her surviving brother Trip produces a trashy reality courtroom show and mostly wants everyone to calm down.

It's 2004, an election year with a war going badly, a time when, as Trip points out, "People need funny." But "funny" is not really what this play is about. What makes it sturdier than the average family-secret-at-Christmas drama is that Baitz refuses to let anyone be simply right. Brooke's generation believes the truth heals, that silence is a kind of violence, that you owe the people you love your unfiltered self. Polly and Lyman believe some things are kept private not out of cowardice but out of love and that a story isn't yours alone to tell just because you were in it.

Baitz has spent three decades writing this exact American wound: parents formed by political or aesthetic ideology living alongside children formed by therapy culture and disclosure. He made his name in the late '80s and early '90s with plays like The Substance of Fire and A Fair Country , which feed on similar material, and he knows how to make a family argument bristle. OTHER DESERT CITIES premiered off-Broadway in January 2011 and moved to Broadway that November, earned a Pulitzer nomination for drama, won the Outer Critics Circle Award, and picked up five Tony nominations including Best Play. Its original title was softer and kinder, Love and Mercy ; the finished one is colder, and it's the more honest title for what Polly and Lyman have actually built for themselves in Palm Springs: not really a home, but a retreat, a place where the right friends, the right politics, and the right amount of forgetting can pass for peace.

The play is also a memory play. Nearly everything that matters happened offstage, years earlier, and the time onstage is spent entirely on people fighting over how to narrate an absence. That's a hard needle for a director to thread, and Koelbel threads it. His pacing never lets the audience settle into "comfortable family drama" mode long enough to be blindsided later by anything less than fully earned.

The design does real work toward that. The action occurs in a spacious living room beyond which a pool and mountains suggest a cool remove from the heat building inside. Koelbel's design requires a team to realize his vision: well-placed wall hangings, furniture, and memorabilia that lock in exactly who these people are – with credit due to David Schramm (set builder), Curt Hills and Fatou Bojang (painters), and Vicki Ronan, Marilyn Linde, and Courtney Koelbel. The eye-catching life-size pool that completes the Palm Springs illusion is actually a print, contributed by Daleena Aiken and Richard Jackson of Techniprint, a detail worth noting because it does exactly what good scenic illusion should: it reads as real rather than painted.

Brooke is the hardest role in the play to make sympathetic without making her insufferable. She is righteous but fragile and not always fair to the people she's confronting. Lauren Isherwood takes the role and polishes it with restraint until it finally breaks under the weight of what she’s forcing into the open. The moment she tells her parents what the memoir is actually about, a wave of emotion is unleashed, but it's a wave hardly as furious as the one that arises with a later revelation. The playwright has been careful to make sure the audience learns that secrets don't come in one size.

Steven Mastroieni is volcanic as Lyman. He plays the genial host, effusing an easy charm and a practiced warmth. But that charm is armor built over decades in public life, worn by a man who has genuinely convinced himself that some truths are best kept buried. Watching that armor strain, bearing the weight of a bombshell, and finally give, as the family closes in on what he doesn't want said aloud, is the most quietly devastating thing in the show… this from an actor who’s turned in one tour de force after another on this stage.

Debra Rich delivers a commanding and magnetic performance as Polly, the poised conservative matriarch fiercely committed to protecting the family's image and to holding her place in the country-club world she's spent a lifetime assimilating into. She's brutally unforgiving of her daughter's plan to publish, for the old pain it threatens to dredge back up. She makes Polly's case for privacy feel less like denial than doctrine, because she genuinely believes what she's protecting is worth what it costs.

Vicki Ronan's Silda, played with verve and a live-wire unpredictability, gives the play its most volatile counterweight to Rich's control. Every scene between the two of them carries two decades of unspoken history, and the actresses play it through rapid-fire, cynical exchanges and accusations. The real issues of assimilation, political identity, and codependency are always buried under whatever they're technically arguing about. Together, they raise the room's temperature the same way Polly and Brooke do.

Alec Melger plays Trip, the brother who tries to be the peacemaker, cracking jokes to keep the room from combusting. The show goes still and becomes electrifying when he finally snaps, confronting his family over how their fixation on a decades-old tragedy has left him feeling unseen. Instead of picking a side in their endless argument, he pleads for normalcy, his rage palpable as he begs his parents to give Brooke a pass for choosing to publish. He warns them that, in the end, all that matters "is how you loved."

By the time the last secret is actually said out loud, the play has already made its case. Brooke's crusade for disclosure, which looks like the moral position, turns out to be built on a story she never fully owned in the first place, and pursuing it nearly unravels a lie her parents have spent decades protecting at enormous cost. Which is why the play isn't saying secrecy is virtuous. It's saying that telling the truth can look like love and still be cruel, and staying silent can look like cowardice and still be love. What Koelbel's cast leaves standing after the demolition isn't comfort. It's the harder thing: the people left in that room, finally seeing what their silence actually cost, and who it was actually for.

OTHER DESERT CITIES runs through September 27th at:

Theatre Artists Studio -- https://www.thestudiophx.org/ -- 12406 N. Paradise Village Parkway E, Scottsdale, AZ -- 602-765-0120

Graphic credit to TAS

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_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/phoenix/article/Review-OTHER-DESERT-CITIES-at-Theatre-Artists-Studio-20260921)._