Jennifer Gregory as Brooke Wyeth & Peter Warden as Trip Wyeth. Photo by Robin Jackson.
[rating:4] (4/5 stars)
Ross Valley Players currently presents the 2012 Pulitzer Prize Nominee for Best Drama, Other Desert Cities by Jon Robin Baitz and directed by Phoebe Moyer.
The play’s name refers to a guide sign on eastbound Interstate 10 in California which indicates that the freeway is headed towards Indio, California and “other desert cities” (that is the rest of the Coachella Valley).
The play’s events occur around the Christmas, 2004 holiday when the family of Polly (Ellen Brooks) and Lyman Wyatt (Dick Martin) gather in Palm Springs. Their daughter Brooke Wyeth (Jennifer Gregory) returns home after six years. Brooke’s brother, Trip Wyeth (Peter Warden) is also present. Polly’s sister Silda Grauman (Kristine Ann Lowry), a recovering alcoholic is also visiting on a break from rehab. Polly and Lyman are Republicans while Silda is liberal. The sisters wrote a series of MGM comedies in the 1960’s. The wonderful set design by Ronald Krempetz is of an upscale, easy living, desert style living room.
The play is set into motion when daughter Brooke announces to her family she is about to publish a memoir dredging up a pivotal and tragic event in the family’s history—a wound they don’t want to have reopened. That event is the suicide of her late brother Henry who had been involved in a radical underground subculture. When this happens, the holiday reunion is thrown into turmoil as family members struggle to come to terms with their past as the Wyeth clan soon realizes some secrets cannot stay buried forever.
The play is well constructed and extremely well written. The cast could not be better under Phoebe Moyer’s firm hand. The actors never strike a false note. In their speech rhythms and body language with one another, their relaxed intimacy or wary distress, their camaraderie or distance, their easy banter or silent hostile regard—they are unmistakably a family.
Other Desert Cities runs at Ross Valley Players May 15-June 15, 2014. Regular Thursday performances are at 7:30 p.m., Friday-Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. All performances take place at the Barn Theatre, home of the Ross Valley Players, 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Ross, CA. For tickets, call 415-456-9553, ext. 1 or visit www.rossvalleyplayers.com.
Coming up next at Ross Valley Players will be Old Money by Wendy Wasserstein and directed by Kim Bromley July 18-August 17, 2014.
Flora Lynn Isaacson
