Different Desert Cities Has Dried Up and Blown Away

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Allison Janney and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Different Desert Cities, on the Hudson Theatre.
Photograph: Emilio Madrid

If for some cause you’d wish to really feel prefer it’s 2011 and even 2004 once more (and pay $800 to do it!), Different Desert Cities is pleased to oblige you. Again on Broadway 15 years after its premiere, plus one other seven from when the majority of its motion is about, Jon Robin Baitz’s rich-family-with-secrets play is, in its present kind, at greatest a trippy expertise. Extra usually, that mildly amusing sense of displacement (the place am I? When am I? Look, it’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus!) curdles into one thing tougher to swallow. The play strikes a pose of cultural commentary — even of heavyweight subject drama; it was Pulitzer-nominated in 2012 — however its essence is extra daytime cleaning soap than scathing cri de coeur. Politics, as was nonetheless doable on loads of phases a decade and a half in the past, is the spice added to the deeply normal meat and potatoes of its construction. To proceed the metaphor, if the play have been a meal made by its central matriarch, Polly Wyeth — a caustic SoCal retiree who runs with Nancy Reagan and desires to know when everyone bought “so rattling delicate about each last item” — she’d in all probability current it with a wink and describe it as ethnic.

Or perhaps she’d simply name it “Chink meals,” precise phrases dropped by the…

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Author : big-apple

Publish date : 2026-10-19 04:55:00

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