OTHER DESERT CITIES 2026 Previews — Page 5

Back from the 10/21/26 matinee: Probably an outlier take on this board, but for my money - a statement with real potency here - this production's MVPs are Harris and Rabe, whose emotional connections to their characters' confessions ground the play anew for me. The Wednesday matinee audience was ready to laugh raucously, and seemed to find the shifting gears in Baitz's well-oiled machinery a challenge. A decade plus fan of the play, I'm still more moved - and entertained - by the shifts away from dramedy. 15 years later, the quips about Bush era America land with less irony than I expected (shall I make presumptions about, um, the make-up of the audience able to book these seats? OT on this board). But the play's strength, always, is its steadfast belief that in exposing cultural fractures, not merely exploiting them for easy laughs, we recognize ourselves.

If the laugh lines feel less stinging (and sometimes less insightful), the play's slowly escalating internecine warfare hasn't lost its high stakes. Harris, in particular, excavates a primal melancholy so acute it takes the play's story into another realm. Louis-Dreyfus, in the audience rewarding role of Polly, ultimately benefits from having a partner whose gravitas demands more of her in the 11th hour. In the original staging, Lyman's touching explanation that Polly could drive three Republican doyennes to tears after shaming their cold shoulder was entirely believable, witnessing the formidable Channing's sangfroid. I never felt that here. But with a less intimidating Polly we do feel that the foregrounded father-daughter friction draws blood, and Baitz's story gains something new. One of Lyman's uncharacteristically uncharitable putdowns of his daughter - a shocking detachment - made the audience gasp, a tribute to Harris and the way his broken Lyman becomes the play's true collateral damage.

Updated On: 10/21/26 at 07:20 PM