‘Other Desert Cities’ at the Walnut

The Wyeths live in a Palm Springs, California retreat, insulated from the rest of the world. Its approaching highway has a fork with signs pointing the way to Palm Springs in one direction and Other Desert Cities in the other. The decor is luxurious, old-school movie-star excess.

Polly (played here by Susan Wilder) is written as nasty, albeit with cringeworthy zinger lines (she refers to Asians as “Chinks”). Lyman (Greg Wood) comes across as a detached evader.

Tell-all memoir

Their children, by contrast, are presented as sympathetic, anti-war liberals who detest their parents’ politics. Their insecure and rebellious daughter Brooke (the alternately thorny and fragile Krista Apple), is about to publish a family memoir. Confronted with the prospect of Brooke’s tell-all memoir, Polly frigidly threatens to disown Brooke, whereas Lyman pathetically begs Brooke to just delay publication “until after we’re gone.”

When Brooke — much like the Reagans’ real-life daughter Patti Davis — puts her personal need and social responsibility ahead of family loyalty and insists on publishing, she launches what one character calls "thermonuclear family war."

To put it mildly, Baitz has stacked the deck here in favor of the young liberals. The fictitious patriarch Lyman is much less outgoing and appealing than his presumed role model, Ronald Reagan (who was almost 70 when he reached the White House). We are told that Lyman suffered a trauma 20 years earlier — one of their sons, an anti-war protester, killed himself after his parents rejected him — so a warmer portrait of him would have been appropriate.

Disheveled sister

This skewed portrayal of liberals and conservatives undermines an otherwise compelling play, blessed with well-developed characters, sparkling dialogue, and unexpected plot twists, all delivered by a strong cast. (My heart was stolen by Ann Crumb, who departed from her customarily sophisticated roles to play Polly’s disheveled sister Silda, a woman as tart-tongued as Polly but a free-thinking, free-spirited left-winger.) Kate Galvin, general manager of the 11th Hour Theater company, directed with brisk pacing and attention to the actors’ reactions when they were not speaking.

Are all conservatives cold and stuffy and all liberals warm and fuzzy? Ronald Reagan, for one, defied that stereotype. By turning his characters into caricatures, Baitz hurts his own drama.