at Vintage Theatre, takes its vague name from California highway signs — “To Palm Springs” reads an exit sign, and another directs drivers to the dry promise of “Other Desert Cities.”
And desert cities, of course, are man-made mirages, with lawns, pools and buildings on land once home to tumbleweed and cacti. So this play, set in Palm Springs, promises an illusion, and boy, does it deliver.
Set on Christmas Eve 2004, the play opens with New Yorker Brooke Wyeth (Molly Killoran) arriving home for the first time in six years. She’s full of East Coast attitude and more than a little entitlement.
Brooke takes her staunch Republican parents to task for their reflexive support of the (first) Iraq war. Her mannered parents (Jan Cleveland and Paul Page) are dismayed by Brooke’s “lefty politics,” which they blame, in part, on the chronic depression that’s landed Brooke at least once in a hospital.
So when Brooke announces that she’s about to publish a tell-all memoir about her older brother’s suicide, her conservative parents are horrified for all the reasons you’d expect.
Her mother frets about the looming damage to the family name, and the fallout that will jeopardize the elder Wyeths’ relationships with Ron and Nancy Reagan and other GOP luminaries. Her father threatens to disown her. Her brother, Trip, a reality-show director from Los Angeles, tries to persuade the parental units to be easier on Brooke.
Brooke’s defensive reaction to her family falls somewhere between writerly pretensions about telling The Truth and her longtime pain that her cherished brother wrote a suicide note only to his parents, and not to her.
But Brooke’s parents have another reason to be dismayed about the pending memoir, scheduled to be excerpted in The New Yorker. Brooke and Trip assume this, too, is about the Wyeths’ threatened social standing — but they’re wrong. The parental Wyeths are stretched to the breaking point over a weighty secret of their own.
Playwright Jon Robin Baitz knows this is how so many families work, managing a tennis game or Christmas Eve tradition on one level, trading thinly veiled barbs on another level, with a veiled foundation of truths that either are pointedly ignored, like divergent political views, or never divulged, like the fugitive key held by the elder Wyeths.
Parents and children alike keep secrets because they want to protect one another from truths they fear are too heavy for someone else to carry. The chorus from the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song is as true in “Other Desert Cities” as it is in reality: “Just look at them and sigh, and know they love you.”
The capable directing is by Bernie Cardell, who also designed the midcentury-modern set.
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477, cmartin@denverpost.com or twitter.com/byclairemartin
“OTHER DESERT CITIES” Written by Jon Robin Baitz. Directed by Bernie Cardell. With Molly Killoran, Jan Cleveland, Paul Page, Libby Rife and Luke Sorge. Through March 1 at Vintage Theatre, 1468 Dayton St., Aurora. Tickets $24 and up at vintagetheatre.org or 303-856-7830
