Other Desert Cities at the Mark Taper Forum [THEATER REVIEW]
Jeannie Berlin as Silda Grauman and JoBeth Williams as her sister Polly Wyeth. Photo by Craig Schwartz Bombs aren’t just going off in Baghdad; there’s a big one set to explode in Palm Springs, year 2004, in Jon Robin Baitz’s Pulitzer Prize finalist, “Other Desert Cities.” At the Taper through Jan. 6, this internecine drama revolves around the one family member who is not present while bearing down on the daughter who seeks her parents’ blessing – and the latter’s intransigence in not bestowing it upon her. Lyman Wyeth (Robert Foxworth) and Polly Wyeth (JoBeth Williams) are, respectively, a former B-movie leading actor and screenwriter, presumably back in the 1950s, early ‘60s, former friends of Ronnie and Nancy (as if that defines them), and currently staunch Republicans who support what another gunslinger of a president is stirring up in the Middle East. However, of their three children, the two oldest were politicized in the other direction. Elder brother Henry went the Patty Hearst route, so to speak, became implicated in a bombing at a recruiting center in Long Beach in which one person died, and then apparently committed suicide by leaping from a ferry into a very cold ocean…
Read this story on easyreadernews.com