Other Desert Cities runs at Melbourne Theatre Company from 2 March
– 17 April. By Jon Robin Baitz, directed by Sam Strong.
As readers of my blog will probably be aware, I do the
majority of my theatre reviewing in Sydney. However, I recently found myself in
Melbourne for academic purposes, and so I thought I’d check out some of what’s
going on down there. And so I went along to Other
Desert Cities, Sam Strong’s (late of Sydney’s Griffin Theatre Company)
directorial debut in his new position as artistic associate at Melbourne
Theatre Company.
This is a very fine script. This is not exactly a secret –it
was nominated for a Pulitzer, so this is hardly a groundbreaking observation. Other Desert Cities is the story of a
family in crisis. Brooke (Sacha Horler) and Trip (Ian Meadows), the children of
Republican senator Lyman Wyeth (John Gaden) and his hardass wife Polly Wyeth
(Robyn Nevin) have come home to Palm Springs for the holidays. Brooke has
shocking news to tell her family: she has written a tell-all memoir about the
life and death of her older brother Henry, who rebelled against his parents and
who Lyman and Polly turned away when he needed help the most. This memoir, if
published, will rock the Wyeth family to the core. But, as we learn over the
course of the play, there is far more to the story of Henry than Brooke knows.
The truth – if there is one – is more complicated than her perspective.
One of the most common things that writers get told is to
show, not tell. I completely understand why this is useful advice for writers
starting out; however, this play is a testament to the power of storytelling
(emphasis on the telling) and the fact that sometimes action is more powerful
in retrospect. Truth becomes splintered and multiplied in Other Desert Cities, refracted through all the perspectives of the
characters. Everyone has their own version of the action, different pieces of
the puzzle, different narratives that they have lived by, stories they have
told.
The reason writers get told to show, not tell, is so they
don’t fall into the trap of having characters talking about the interesting
stuff that has happened rather than allowing the audience to see what actually
happened. Other Desert Cities has
almost a story within a story: it is the story of the disparate reactions of
the Wyeth family to the disparate versions of the Henry story. The script is
strong enough to break the show-don’t-tell rule – we are definitely more
invested in the how-people-react story rather than the what-actually-happened
story. However, the danger with this kind of narrative is that it can become
sedentary – a bunch of people talking without anything actually seeming to
happen. I measured the places where the narrative flagged by the woman sitting
next to me: when things weren’t happening, psychologically speaking, for the
Wyeth family, she would promptly fall asleep. This is not to say that the show was
in any way boring, because it wasn’t. However, she did provide a remarkably
accurate barometer as to when interesting tensions were being exploited as
opposed to when characters were simply sparring or bantering. Sam Strong’s
direction was taut enough that she didn’t fall asleep often. The scenes she
drifted off in were largely those involving Trip, and I was sad for her,
because I really enjoyed Ian Meadows’ work in this production. His character is
caught in the middle of the battle between the Wyeth parents and Brooke, and so
he becomes somewhat extraneous to it, but he had some great moments. (I would
totally watch that trashy reality courtroom show he works on. So hard. I love
the way that, in a play which deals so much with ideas of truth, his daily work
was on reality TV, the fakest truth there is. It was so perfect.)
One of the cleverest things about this show was the set. As
soon as I walked in and saw that glass box on the stage, my mind went straight
to the Simon Stone place, but I feel like the glass was symbolic in a different
way here. The glass reflects the truth as we see it, but we can also see
through it to something else. Transparency and truth were one of the major
preoccupations of the play. In the first act, characters can pass through the
transparent space of the house, skirting it but not addressing it. In the
second act, when truths are revealed, they are contained within it,
transparency becoming a prison, truth doing the opposite of setting them free.
This was cleverly mirrored by the swimming pool at the front of the stage: it
too reflected back an image, but if you tried to penetrate too deep, you could
drown (just like Henry).
I feel like Other
Desert Cities could easily have become static and dull, but in the deft
hands of Sam Strong, it is a deeply engaging and moving piece of theatre. The
cast is magnificent – I have already mentioned the work of Ian Meadows, but I
would be remiss not to note the wonderful work of Sacha Horler and Robyn Nevin
also. John Gaden tended a little towards the melodramatic in certain moments on
occasion with his portrayal of Lyman, but his performance was nonetheless
wonderful and nuanced, as was Sue Jones’ performance as Polly’s recovering
alcoholic sister. Don’t let the woman who fell asleep next to me put you off:
this is a great show. It engages cleverly with ideas of story, truth, and
performativity. It is funny without letting the humour overtake the story at
its heart: humour, in this show, is just another way the truth is deflected.
