Other Desert Cities

Other Desert Cities is a family drama by Jon Robin Baitz, set in a house in Palm Springs, California, over the Christmas holiday. A grown daughter comes home carrying a book about the most painful event in the family's past, and her parents, Republicans who once belonged to Ronald Reagan's inner circle, would much prefer that it stay unpublished. The visit turns into an argument about politics, loyalty and grief, and above all about who has the right to tell a family's story.

This staging is the first Broadway revival of the play. Baitz's drama began Off-Broadway at Lincoln Center Theater, moved to Broadway in 2011, was one of the finalists for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and collected five Tony Award nominations, Best Play among them.

The revival plays the Hudson Theatre as a 16-week limited engagement, directed by the Tony-winning actor John Benjamin Hickey. As of October 2026, the cast of five is Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Joe Keery and Lily Rabe.

The play opens on Christmas Eve 2004 at the Wyeth home in Palm Springs. Brooke Wyeth has come back from New York, where she has spent six years writing for magazines and has been through a depression after her divorce. Her younger brother, Trip, a reality TV producer, is home as well.

Their father, Lyman Wyeth, acted in films before going into Republican politics and later serving as a U.S. ambassador. Back in the 1960s their mother, Polly, and her sister, Silda Grauman, were a writing team whose screen comedies were made at MGM. Silda is staying with the Wyeths. She is a liberal and a recovering alcoholic who has only just come out of rehab, and her politics line up with Brooke's rather than with her sister's.

What Brooke has brought with her is a manuscript, a memoir that is about to come out. It tells the story of the family's older son, Henry: how he fell in with a radical underground group in Venice, California, was implicated in a bombing that left someone dead, and later took his own life. Henry is never seen on stage.

Polly and Lyman want that chapter of their lives to stay closed. As the holiday wears on, the reunion hardens into a standoff over the book, and then into a deeper quarrel over whose account of Henry is accurate and who gets to put it in print. Trip ends up in the middle, pulled one way by his sister and the other way by his parents. The play holds its revelations for the final scenes, and this guide leaves them there.

Jon Robin Baitz was born in Los Angeles in 1961 and grew up partly in Brazil and in apartheid-era South Africa. His other plays include The Substance of Fire, A Fair Country and The Paris Letter. For television he created the ABC series Brothers & Sisters, on the air from 2006 to 2011, and for FX he was the writer and an executive producer of Feud: Capote vs. The Swans. Baitz has been both a Guggenheim fellow and an NEA fellow, and he helped found the New York theater company Naked Angels.

This is a compact, character-driven play: five people, one family home and one holiday, plus an epilogue set in 2010. The political divide is out in the open from the start, with two conservative parents on one side and a liberal-leaning daughter and aunt on the other. Underneath the politics, the play is about family secrets and about what a writer owes the people she writes about. That question has extra weight in a house where the mother and the aunt once wrote for the movies themselves.

The title is borrowed from the freeway. Drivers heading east on Interstate 10 in California pass a guide sign naming Indio and "Other Desert Cities" in the Coachella Valley. During its development the play reportedly went by a different title, Love and Mercy.

As of October 2026, the company is led by Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Polly Wyeth, Ed Harris as Lyman Wyeth, Allison Janney as Silda Grauman, Lily Rabe as Brooke Wyeth and Joe Keery as Trip. The understudies are Kathryn Meisle for both Polly and Silda, Tony Carlin for Lyman, Japhet Balaban for Trip and Amanda Drinkall for Brooke.

Louis-Dreyfus is making her Broadway debut. She has won 11 Emmy Awards, and her television career runs from Saturday Night Live through Seinfeld, where she was Elaine Benes, to Veep. Harris has four Oscar nominations to his name; his first Broadway outing, Precious Sons, earned him a Tony nomination, and his later Broadway credits include To Kill a Mockingbird and Taking Sides.

Janney's last Broadway appearance before this one was Six Degrees of Separation in 2017, a production in which Hickey also appeared. She won an Academy Award for I, Tonya, has collected seven Emmy Awards, including for Mom and The West Wing, and was Tony-nominated for A View from the Bridge and 9 to 5. She and Harris both appeared in the film The Hours.

Rabe first appeared on Broadway in Steel Magnolias, and The Merchant of Venice earned her a Tony nomination. Keery, known for playing Steve Harrington on Stranger Things and for the music he records as Djo, is making his Broadway debut.

In August 2010 the Ojai Playwrights Conference in California hosted an early staged reading. Lincoln Center Theater then gave the play its world premiere Off-Broadway at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, with previews from December 16, 2010, and an official opening on January 13, 2011. Joe Mantello directed Stockard Channing as Polly, Stacy Keach as Lyman, Linda Lavin as Silda, Elizabeth Marvel as Brooke and Thomas Sadoski as Trip. That limited run ended on February 27, 2011.

Mantello's production then moved to Broadway, where Lincoln Center Theater presented it at the Booth Theatre in association with Bob Boyett. Previews started on October 12, 2011, and opening night was November 3, 2011. Two roles changed hands for the transfer: Judith Light took over Silda from Lavin, and Rachel Griffiths, in her Broadway debut, replaced Marvel as Brooke.

The Booth engagement was first due to end on January 8, 2012, but it became an open-ended run. Justin Kirk stepped in as Trip in January 2012, and when Griffiths left on March 4, 2012, Marvel returned as Brooke on March 6, 2012. The production closed on June 17, 2012, after 261 performances and 25 previews. It was Baitz's first original play on Broadway; his adaptation of Hedda Gabler had been seen there in 2001.

In 2011 the film rights were bought by Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald, who planned to have Baitz write the screenplay himself; no film has been made. The play did lead to other screen work: Roland Emmerich, an admirer of it, brought Baitz on as the writer of Stonewall, Emmerich's 2015 film.

The revival and its cast were announced on May 26, 2026. Previews at the Hudson Theatre began on September 29, 2026, with opening night scheduled for October 18, 2026.