Other Desert Cities

Other Desert Cities, at Broadway's Booth Theatre
Gratuitous Violins rating: ***1/2 out of ****

I've been hooked on a few nighttime soap operas over the years, most notably Dallas and Falcon Crest. But there hasn't been one recently that captured my interest until Brothers & Sisters, which ABC canceled in May after a five-year run.

So a big part of my excitement about Other Desert Cities stemmed from knowing that it was written by Jon Robin Baitz, the creator of Brothers & Sisters, and included a cast member from the series, Rachel Griffiths.

In some ways, Other Desert Cities felt like a very special episode of Brothers & Sisters: it revolves around the problems of a wealthy and prominent family. All the nighttime soap ingredients are present - drug addiction, depression, alcoholism. Family secrets are about to be revealed and a long-buried scandal unearthed. There's a black sheep, too.

Now, I don't mean any of that as a knock. Popular fiction is tough to get right and I'd rather read John Grisham than John Updike. And I liked Other Desert Cities a lot. It's a highly polished work with terrific performances. Baitz has a good ear for dialogue. The direction by Joe Mantello makes the action clean and clear. But it seemed like something I'd seen before.

Heading the family are Stacy Keach and Stockard Channing as Lyman and Polly Wyeth. He's a former actor turned Republican Party official and ambassador. She's a former screenwriter. They travel in the same circles as the Reagans. (When the scandal broke, Polly mustered all of her strength to get back in the good social graces of Ron and Nancy.)

When the play opens, it's Christmas 2004 and the family has gathered at the Wyeths' home in Palm Springs. John Lee Beatty has designed a living room that looks beautiful in a rustic kind of way, with a huge stone wall, but not especially comfortable.

The source of tension is Brooke's plan to publish a tell-all memoir which, needless to say, is upsetting to her family.

I've loved Griffiths from TV and movies and she's riveting onstage as well, playing a vulnerable woman suffering from depression who's about to let out all of this smoldering anger toward her parents. A novelist with one successful book, the memoir has enabled her to break through her writer's block. She feels compelled to publish it, no matter how much pain it causes.

As her brother Trip, a producer of highly successful reality-TV shows, Thomas Sadoski is more easygoing. Much younger, he doesn't share her intense anger. Baitz makes an interesting point here, how siblings can have widely divergent memories of their childhood and how parents can change over time so that maybe they were raised differently.

Channing and Judith Light as two very different sisters are a joy to watch as well. Polly is the picture of composure while Light's Silda is messy, an acerbic alcoholic. They're Jewish but Polly seemed pretty WASPY. Silda explains this with one of the play's best lines: "We're Jewish girls who lost our accents along the way but that wasn't enough for you, you had to become a goy."

While I liked the way Baitz explored the family dynamic, his attempt at getting political struck me as more cliched. Keach's Lyman fulminates against the generation that ruined this country with their drugs, free sex and radical politics. Brooke and Silda rail against the intolerance of conservative Republicans.

What stood out for me was the way Other Desert Cities explores the heart of this fractious family. Polly and Lyman don't share Brooke's view that her memoir will be cathartic. It forces them to come clean about secrets that they've been keeping for a very long time. (To be honest, the plot twist wasn't very original.)

Baitz gives them both powerful, emotional speeches. For all the coldness and harshness with which Brooke tries to portray them, Lyman and Polly Wyeth are caring people. The play is a testament to a parent's love for their child - no matter what. It's also a testament to what very rich and powerful people are able to do for their children.

Baitz left Brothers & Sisters after a year due to disagreements with the network over the show's direction. At the time, he decried "the demographic demands that have turned America into an ageist and youth-obsessed nation drives the storylines younger and younger, whiter and whiter, and with less and less reflection of the real America.

I'll give Baitz credit for including older characters in Other Desert Cities but he's written a play pretty similar to what he's criticized the networks for doing. It's as white as can be and not exactly reflective of the "real America."

Still, it was tremendously entertaining to see a juicy family drama onstage just like the ones that I've loved in novels and on TV. And it's always comforting to be reminded that rich people have problems, too.

The Normal Heart

The Normal Heart, at Broadway's Golden Theatre
Gratuitous Violins rating: **** out of ****

I saw The Normal Heart and I wept.

Larry Kramer's 1985 work, this year's Tony winner for Best Revival of a Play, was so powerful and performed by such a remarkable ensemble that I don't think I've been as deeply affected by anything I've seen onstage since I started going to the theatre in 2007.

The Normal Heart is set in New York City between 1981 and 1984, when gay men were being stricken by a deadly and baffling disease that wasn't yet called AIDS. It's a largely autobiographical account of Kramer's efforts to sound the alarm and his role in founding the Gay Men's Health Crisis.

It's also the second work about this period that I've seen in the past couple of months - both by gay Jewish writers and drawing heavily on Jewish themes. While Tony Kushner's Angels in America is soaring and poetic and filled with biblical imagery The Normal Heart is searing, full of anger and references to the Holocaust.

I'm always wary of writers using Holocaust analogies but this one resonated, perhaps because I know our shared history: gays and Jews were both persecuted by the Nazis. And the story of The Normal Heart is sadly familiar: a group of people facing discrimination and unable to live their lives openly cope with a catastrophic event at a time when few know or care about their plight.

As Kramer's stand-in, activist and writer Ned Weeks, Joe Mantello is magnificent. Mantello, who directed one of my favorite musicals, Wicked, returned to acting for this role and he delivers one of the most intense and enthralling performances I've ever seen. (Interestingly, both Wicked and The Normal Heart are, in part, about feeling comfortable in your own skin.)

Abrasive and impatient with just about everyone - his brother, the medical establishment, city hall, the media and his more cautious gay friends - Weeks' outrage was always understandable and earned. It never seemed like Mantello was shouting just for the sake of shouting.

He lacerates the gay community for what he sees as its timidity: "Is this how so many people just walked into gas chambers? But at least they identified themselves to each other and to the world." And he's stirring and impassioned in his plea that gay men are more than simply sexual beings. We are, he says, unique and accomplished individuals - artists and writers and scientists. We helped win World War II.

And Mantello handled the play's flashes of wry humor, especially the self-deprecating Jewish kind, equally well. It's a perfectly modulated, riveting performance and it appears effortless.

What's so absorbing about Weeks is that Kramer gives us not only the activist but the personal side, too. Mark Harelik plays Weeks' brother, Ben, a successful lawyer who loves his sibling but falls short of understanding and accepting him. Their interaction and Harelik's transformation are compelling to watch.

At first Weeks' lover, Felix Turner, a closeted New York Times style reporter played by the Tony-winning John Benjamin Hickey, seems his polar opposite. But the two complement each other beautifully. Turner, quiet and calm, brings out a tenderness in the rumpled and caustic Weeks that's so appealing and poignant.

And Ellen Barkin, a Tony winner in her Broadway debut, is fierce as Dr. Emma Brookner, a physician treating gay men who have fallen ill with a rare cancer. Brookner, confined to a wheelchair from a childhood bout with polio, is electrifying as she rails against the indifference of government officials and medical researchers toward the disease.

The title of The Normal Heart comes from a poem by W.H. Auden, "Sept. 1, 1939." It contains the line "We must love one another or die." But what happens when you love one another and die? Brookner lectures an incredulous Weeks that in order to save their lives, he must urge gay men to stop having sex. When he asks her whether at least they can still kiss she responds, simply, that she just doesn't know.

I've seen more than my fair share of preachiness onstage and from what I knew about The Normal Heart going in, I was afraid that it would be more agitprop than anything else. I was so wrong. Directors George C. Wolfe and Joel Grey bring out the best in everyone in the superb cast and they all deliver compelling performances. Yes, it's political but Kramer never allows the audience to forget that this is a very human story.

The first time I couldn't hold back the tears that had been welling up all evening was in a scene where Lee Pace, playing closeted Citibank executive Bruce Niles, describes bringing his lover home to die. Hearing what they went through, the ignorance and prejudice they faced, was anguishing and I started to weep.

But what truly got to me in The Normal Heart, beyond the deaths and the indifference toward this nascent epidemic, as horrible as they were, was the fear.

The fear that men like Turner, Niles and Patrick Breen's Health Department worker Mickey Marcus expressed about identifying themselves publicly as gay, and possibly losing their jobs, was palpable and heartbreaking. They could barely bring themselves to be associated with an organization that had the word "gay" in its name.

I saw The Normal Heart two days after the New York state Senate voted to legalize gay marriage. Astonishingly, there are a couple of references to marriage in the play, a topic that I don't think was on anybody's radar in the 1980s. Talk about prescience. (It also struck me that the men refer to their "lovers," never to a partner or even boyfriend.)

Jim Parsons, who plays the sweet and easygoing Southerner Tommy Boatwright, got huge applause when he said, "Maybe if they'd let us get married to begin with none of this would have happened at all."

Twenty-five years after the events depicted in The Normal Heart, AIDS has become a manageable disease - if you're in the developed world and have access to health care. Today, the GMHC has a long list of corporate donors and even an official airline.

But the play's depiction of a community under stress gives it a certain timelessness. The Normal Heart is a potent reminder of how far we've come and how much work remains. (And producer Daryl Roth deserves an immense amount of credit for bringing it to Broadway. You can listen to her talk about it here.)

Everyone leaving the theatre gets a letter from Kramer telling us that what we saw was true and that the fight against AIDS continues. "Please know that the world has suffered at the very least some 75 million infections and 35 million deaths. When the action of the play that you have just seen begins, there were 41."

And while more and more Americans know someone who is gay, and support for same-sex marriage grows, homophobia certainly hasn't disappeared.

Last week, a report came out saying that half of gay and lesbian white-collar workers are not out in the workplace. It remains legal in 29 states to discriminate against someone on the job because of their sexual orientation. Those are shameful statistics. No one should fear losing their job because they're gay or lesbian.

Unfortunately, this is the final week for The Normal Heart on Broadway. But the producers are aiming for a national tour. Everyone - gay and straight - should see it.