The gift of honesty

Does art trump life, or are there some secrets too damaging to reveal?

This is the question raised by Other Desert Cities, Jon Robin Baitz’s powerful 2011 drama now playing at Theatre on the Ridge in Paradise. It’s a refreshing change of pace for TOTR, which ordinarily presents community-theater crowd-pleasers, not politically and emotionally potent plays like this one.

Artistic Director Jerry Miller has turned to his longtime colleague Joe Hilsee (the Blue Room Theatre, Rogue Theatre) to direct this production, and Hilsee in turn has collected one of the most talented casts I’ve seen on a Butte County stage.

The title comes from a road sign outside Palm Springs giving drivers a choice to turn off to that city or continue on to “other desert cities.” It’s also a veiled reference to the war in Iraq, which is raging on the day the play takes place, Christmas Eve 2004. Disagreement about the war is one of the several fault lines beneath the Wyeth family, which has gathered in the Palm Springs home of Polly and Lyman Wyeth, a wealthy, conservative couple not unlike their friends Ronald and Nancy Reagan. He’s a former B-movie actor later appointed (by Reagan) to be an ambassador, and she’s a former writer (in partnership with her sister, Silda Grauman) of low-budget movie comedies.

Visiting for the holidays are their two more liberal children, Brooke, a writer who lives on the East Coast, and Trip, who lives in Los Angeles and produces a reality-TV show. Silda, a sharp-tongued alcoholic just out of rehab, is also there.

It’s a loving family, but it stands on shaky ground. Another fault line has to do with Henry, the Wyeths’ first born. Years earlier he’d joined a Weather Underground-like group that, in blowing up a building, accidentally killed a janitor. Henry subsequently took his own life.

Brooke arrives carrying a manuscript of a just-completed memoir that has been accepted for publication. She hopes to get her parents’ blessing but is filled with trepidation, since the book blames them for her brother’s death.

Others don’t share Brooke’s view of long-ago events, least of all her mother. Polly, here played by the marvelous Joyce Henderson, could give Nancy Reagan lessons in the art of genteel put-downs. She describes Brooke’s ex-husband, for example, as “too old and too British,” adding, “They’re all so old, the Brits, even the children.”

Mother and daughter are much alike, actually, headstrong and manipulative and at the same time deeply loving. Brooke is played by Sheri Bagley, another local-theater veteran, as someone whose need for success as a writer has made her somewhat blind to the pain her book will cause and the possibility that she could be wrong.

Richard Lauson, who has been acting in and directing TOTR productions since 1976, plays Lyman Wyeth as a man in retreat. A conservative with antiquated views in a blue state, he’s someone with secrets he wants kept buried.

Trip, the youngest of the Wyeth offspring, is the most grounded of the group. Only 5 years old when Henry died, he’s been spared the heartbreak his parents and Brooke have suffered. Steve Swim, who’s acted in a variety of productions under several banners (Blue Room, Chico Cabaret, Rogue, Butte College), plays him as an earthy, profane regular guy with an outsider’s insight into family dynamics.

Then there’s Aunt Silda, the wild card in the game. She’s a plot device, serving as Brooke’s ally in assigning blame, but she’s also a liberal foil to Lyman and Polly’s conservatism and, as a wisecracking recovering alcoholic, a humorous commentator on family foibles. JC Newport does a terrific job in creating this complex character.

Other Desert Cities is a Christmas tale, which is to say it’s about love of family even when that love is tested. It’s also about gifts: By the time Christmas Day dawns, the Wyeth family will have dug deep into its bag of secrets and given itself the gift of honesty. For all the pain it describes, this is a heart-warming—and often quite funny—story.