Gloves off in family spat
THEATRE
Other Desert Cities
By Jon Robin Baitz
Black Swan Theatre Company/Queensland Theatre Company
Heath Ledger Theatre
REVIEW MARK NAGLAZAS
Could the title of this new American play be more evocative? Other Desert Cities refers to both the Middle East conflict in which the US was mired after 9/11 and a road sign outside Palm Springs that suggests different directions and destinies the country might take. The marvel of the moniker is matched by the work that follows.
This is an elegant entangling of the political and the personal that gets us thinking about significant issues, such as intergenerational misunderstanding and responsibilities of free speech, while immersing us in a deeply moving family tragedy.
Such is the quality of Jon Robin Baitz' writing - shimmering with acerbic dialogue but never clever for its own sake, seamless in its plot developments and startling twists, generous in the treatment of all the antagonists - that it takes us back to the time when drama ruled our stages instead of "theatre makers" and their idiosyncratic visions.
Baitz is well served by director Kate Cherry and her first-rate cast in this interstate collaboration. All the elements - including the eye-popping yet purposeful set by Christina Smith and the subtle, superbly calibrated lighting by Trent Suidgeest- work in unison to give us one of the most polished, sophisticated productions in the State Theatre Centre's short history.
Special mentions go to the set and lighting designs because Other Desert Cities takes place over a single combative Christmas Day and night in 2004 in the Palm Springs home of a retired, politically connected Hollywood couple. It is one of those gorgeous low-slung stone-and-glass affairs backed by a big sky we see in those cool west coast episodes of Mad Men (with the dimension and depth of a wide-screen movie of the same era).
While we drool over the lush retro-spread of Lyman and Polly Wyeth (Robert Coleby and Janet Andrewartha) it's a graveyard for deeply troubled daughter Brooke (Rebecca Davis), who has stayed away for six years because she cannot stand her parents' conservative politics - they're great friends of Ronald and Nancy Reagan - and their crocodile-skinned Republican Party cronies in this famed California retirement town.
Brooke, a writer with a long history of mental illness, has made the trip from New York to Palm Springs to get her parents' blessing for her soon-to-be- published memoir that has a special reference to her late brother, a left-wing Vietnam-era activist who killed himself after being involved in a Weather Underground-style bombing.
All hell breaks loose, fuelled by the freely flowing liquor, as the formidable family matriarch Polly drags Brooke over the coals for her willingness to open the family up to embarrassment to kick-start her stalled literary career, with the former actor-turned-diplomat Lyman trying to broker a peace deal and Brooke's brother, a laid-back pleasure-loving reality TV show producer (Conrad Coleby), struggling not to get dragged in.
Coleby and Coleby, real-life father and son, give beautifully measured performances but Other Desert Cities belongs to the women, with Neighbours veteran Andrewartha the stand-out as the imperious, impeccably groomed Polly, a frighteningly articulate former Hollywood screenwriter who has erased her Jewish origins and reinvented herself as a Republican iron lady.
Vivienne Garrett adds a jolt of goofy, anarchic comedy as Polly's left-leaning alcoholic sister Silda, with whom she once wrote a series of successful Sandra Dee-type MGM comedies in the 1960s.
"The zealots have taken over your party and marinated it in intolerance," sneers Silda, who herself knows a thing or two about being pickled.
A colleague quipped after the show that he felt it was a little unbalanced because Brooke is too dislikable, too self-centred and too set on destroying the family for her own gain (I actually think Davis could have ratcheted up the neurotic level a notch or two).
But the genius of this play - the best of its kind I've encountered since John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation - is that our judgments tell us as much about ourselves as the characters, that we take sides depending on our age, our class, our politics.
And, more importantly, it makes us think about slipping back into those default positions.
Other Desert Cities is gripping theatre for grown-ups, for those who take notice of politics, who argue issues over dinner, who worry about their children, their parents and their country.
And it's perfectly timed for the coming nation-dividing election.
Other Desert Cities is at the State Theatre Centre until August 4.
