PLAY: Other Desert Cities, by Jon Robin Baitz

A show-biz/political family’s Christmas holiday in Palm Springs during the 1960’s.  Wry, comical, sad, the play sets up a liberal-conservative duel between conservative parents and liberal children - how can anyone talk about politics anymore when these divides exist between generations and siblings?  I had to see this play.  The answer is, they all loved each other more than the families I’m involved with do.

The play received mixed reviews, but I liked it, although it felt a bit like a TV sitcom and looked like one too. At the end of the play, we discover that the parents, these paragons of Republican virtue, faked a suicide to shield their son from prosecution for a crime he’d committed.  It was quite astonishing and unexpected.  Did they do so to protect their own high profile careers, or for the sake of their son?  Both, a most ambigious life choice.

The problem with going to the Taper Forum is that it’s hard to hear - in the round theatres were all the democratic fashion some years ago, but they have a terrible problem of relation to the audience, which frontal stage/auditoriums manage to overcome somewhat.