The Ghosts of the Vietnam War Haunt Riveting "Other Desert Cities" in New York

Other Desert Cities
Booth Theater
222 W. 45th Street
New York, N.Y.

Brooke Wyeth, the super-liberal daughter of a former ‘B’ film movie star and ambassador, has written a scathing memoir about her family.   It focuses on the story of her brother Henry, who, along with others, blew up a U.S. Army recruiting station during the Vietnam War and then shortly afterwards committed suicide.  The book blasts her parents for hating Henry, abandoning him in his hour of need and, indirectly, bringing about his death.  It is the opening salvo in a seething battle between Brooke, her alcoholic aunt Sila Grauman and her parents in Other Desert Cities, last spring’s award winning play that just moved from Lincoln Center to Broadway.  The powerful drama that opened last night is a stunner, a bombshell in itself and yet another chapter in America’s endless and infuriating Vietnam War saga.

The story unfolds at the classy Palm Springs home of the aging and blustery Ambassador Lyman Wyeth (Stacy Keach) and his wife Polly (Stockard Channing), the perfectly drawn conservative Republican wife who has beautifully adopted the Palm Springs rich people’s walk and talk. The couple, who knew all the powerful Republicans, including the Reagans,  are joined  by Brooke, her brother, a reality TV show producer, and Brooke’s aunt Silda, who wanders in and out of pill induced stupors. They are all in Palm Springs for the Christmas holidays.

Brooke taunts her politically conservative parents as soon as the play opens (“I have to go, I have to take a conference call from Al Queada”) and continually belittles them for their political beliefs. She ignores whatever they have to say about politics, her, or her brother. She is right and they are wrong.

Dad Lyman protests. “We’re not monsters,” he argues, very energetically, but Brooke will not listen. She is in a constant rage. Her mother and father remind her that they did everything possible for her in her life, including getting her into and paying for an extensive sixth month rehab at a splashy New England clinic.

The acting in the play, written with enormous skill by Jon Robin Baitz and directed by the deft hand of veteran Joe Mantello,  is superb. Keach is strong as Lyman Wyeth, who  is a bear of a man coming to grips with his professional and personal life at the same time. Channing, as wife Polly, is even better as the former screenwriter who has patched her life back together after her son’s death. Tom Sadoski is good as he quixiotic  brother, who agrees with his sister, but with his parents too.  Rachel Griffiths is dynamic as Brooke, especially when, in a fury, she tosses her book manuscript into the air and pages drift through the air before they settle to the floor. Judith Light is sensational as the failed aunt, who is taken care of by Lyman and Polly and who irritates the hell out of them all day long. Each is wonderful, but together, as an ensemble, with director Mantello as their conductor, they are a well oiled and very powerful  machine.  It is their acting skills that make the play move along at a steady gallop and allows them to reach back into United States history and into the never ending cauldron of Vietnam.

Writer Baitz wrote a very funny play that sizzles with humor in the first act. There is less and less humor as the play continues and then ends in a dramatic and totally unpredictable way.

What pulls this family apart, what pulled so many families apart, was Vietnam. Here are the Wyeths, retired nicely in Palm Springs, a couple that still cannot get away from Vietnam and what it did to their son, an anti-war protestor. The wounds of Vietnam still run deep in the country, even though the conflict in Southeast Asia ended 35 years ago. The war is an octopus whose tentacles still grip people all these years later.

What was admirable in the play was the way that writer Baitz goes back and forth with Vietnam, showing how the deceased Henry’s passions about it led him a crime and the murder of an innocent man. Why couldn’t he stop himself? Why couldn’t his parents stop him? Why didn’t his brother and sister, just kids at the time, understand, later, why he did what he did?

And are his parents really to blame? Were the parents of all the young men and women in America at the ime of the Vietnam War to blame for anything?

People make decisions without their parents’ consent but  their parents have to live with those decisions, too. The Wyeths lives were nearly ruined by their son’s participation in the bombing, and his death. They were victims of the bombing, and of Vietnam, too.

Other Desert Cities does not solve the problem of Vietnam. It merely  opens the old wounds. When  will Vietnam go away?  Will it ever go away?

What is fascinating is how writers like the talented Baitz can tell a wonderful tale about the never ending story of the Vietnam War within the larger tale of family conflict. The drama of the war seeps out early and gets larger and larger in the story.

If you want to see a terrific play and a fine drama about the lingering shadows of the Vietnam War, go see Other Desert Cities.

PRODUCTION:  Produced by Lincoln Center in association with Bob Boyett. Sets: John Lee Beatty, Costumes: David Zinn, Lighting: Kenneth Posner, Sound Jill BC DuBoff. Directed by Joe Mantello.

Bruce Chadwick can be reached at bchadwick@njcu.edu.