The Wyeths have the kind of life a certain version of the American dream tells to us we ought to aspire to: They are wealthy, well-connected, well-educated, fabulously successful. Lyman, the family patriarch, is a retired movie actor who parlayed his Hollywood connections and celebrity into friendship with a president and an ambassadorship. His wife Polly graduated from Bryn Mawr, then came out West with her sister Silda to write screenplays that led to a series of profitable films. Son Trip produces a successful reality TV show, “Jury of Your Peers,” in which families come to play out their petty squabbles in front of a panel of second rate actors and D-list celebrities so as to grab their fifteen minutes of fame. And then there is daughter Brooke, who lives back East and published a critically successful novel several years ago. Her return home for this Christmas holiday after six years away serves as the ostensible basis for the events being acted out.
But, this is no Dickensian Yuletide celebration, nor a Hallmark family homecoming. The Wyeth home looks more like what a movie set of a family home is supposed to look like than anything genuinely lived in. The Christmas tree is stuck in a corner, looking more likely to have been dusted than trimmed. The furniture looks stylish, but rarely used, the kind you have “for show” to sit in when important company comes to call. Only it is the idea of this collection of people acting like “a family” that is as out of place as a houseguest. Silda drowns herself in drink, pills and sleep to escape her discomfort. So anxious and uncertain is Trip about the idea of this gathering that he has three flights booked for the day after Christmas, each to a fantasy land more exotic and faraway than the next. And, despite her parents’ hints that they would like her to relocate to the house next door (which has recently become available), Brooke notes how she was tempted to pass right by the Palm Springs exit toward “Other Desert Cities.” She would rather risk being alone and wandering in the barren wasteland than face time with her family. Clearly, this home is no oasis.
Brooke’s long-awaited new book is about to be published, and she has brought home a copy of the pages for them all to read. It is a memoir that focuses on Brooke and Trip’s older brother, Henry. Good looking, smart, and charismatic, he seemed destined for the success his parents dreamed of for him until his opposition to the war brought him directly into conflict with his parents. Unable to abide his disapprobation any more than he could bear their politics, Henry was shipped off to boarding school, where he became ever more distant and extremist. Before long, he joined a group of radical activists, spurned his family completely, and took part in a bombing that killed a homeless veteran. Brooke’s book tells what she knows and conjures what she doesn’t: On the run, Henry came to his father for help, only to be turned away by Lyman, who even called the police. Though Henry was never found, there was his suicide note that revealed hints of his disappointment and disillusionment with his parents, as well as his fragile and muddled state of mind. Brooke imagines what his last day might have been like.
Like all children, Brooke wantes her parents’ blessing, their approval, no matter that she is exposing old wounds to the cold, biting air. But, Lyman and Polly don’t want family secrets aired: There isn’t a thing out of place in this front room, and the clean designer lines and hardwood floors don’t allow for any rugs to sweep the dirt under. Amidst the pictures that inhabit the set’s unseen fourth wall— of Rock Hudson, Sinatra, Goldwater and Dinah Shore— we are told there are none of Henry. At one point in the family conversation, Polly even slips, referring to two children instead of three, a point quickly corrected by her annoyed and exasperated daughter. Brooke reads their silence as denial, their resistance to her work as a tacit admission of the blood on their hands. Goaded on in that interpretation by her Aunt Silda, who has secretly been reading and editing the manuscript pages, Brooke wants to unloose the family skeletons. Reeling from hospitalizations for depression and a failed marriage, perhaps Brooke thinks these pent up secrets are the pieces that will allow her to decipher her private puzzle. Locked into a lifelong struggle with a steel-willed mother, perhaps she hopes publishing this book offers a chance of detaching once and for all, even if takes wielding an axe to do so.
Using memoir to discern meaning is no straightforward exercise. Family stories, especially stories involving uncomfortable secrets, can be mirage-like, obscuring every bit as much as they clarify. Though Brooke fancies herself oak-like as her father, Trip reminds her that family resemblance is more nuanced than that. Much as Silda— the drunken fool the theatrical trope suggests is speaking truth— may want Brooke’s text to indict Lyman and Polly, she has her own awkward memories to avoid. Ever the politician, Lyman loves his daughter and his wife and desperately wants to traverse the minefield between the two that Brooke’s memoir doesn’t so much create as underscore. “Brooke, I’m looking for room to navigate, for this to feel less like we are cornered,” he says, equal part observation and entreaty. But, cornered they are, all of them, narrator as much as those whose lives she chronicles. Maybe Henry’s story is less the ticking time bomb they fear it is and more like one of the presents beneath the tree. It sits there wrapped and awaiting the arrival of Christmas morning when the secrets it holds can finally be opened and shared.
OTHER DESERT CITIES (by Jon Robin Baitz, directed by Joe Mantello) is running at the Booth Theater (222 W. 45th St) and features a fine veteran cast: Stacy Keach (Lyman), Stockard Channing (Polly), Judith Light (Silda), Elizabeth Marvel (Brooke), and Thomas Sadoski (Trip).
