Review: Brilliant OTHER DESERT CITIES at The Fulton

If you've ever visited a friend's family when a family fight broke out, you're almost prepared for the Fulton Theatre's production of OTHER DESERT CITIES. The 2011 play by Jon Robin Baitz won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, which it richly deserved as it's a brilliantly written, witty, and sometimes gut-wrenching play about massive family dysfunction. But at the Fulton, director Kate Galvin's staging of it in the Fulton's Studio Theatre, as an in-the-round production with only a few rows of chairs on each side, adds the dimension of your feeling exactly as if you've wound up in your friend's living room in the midst of the emotional chaos.

The sparks fly in every conceivable direction: parents tied to the Reagan administration - dad is a stone Republican actor turned ambassador - and a child who's a liberal Democrat. A Jewish wife and a WASP husband, which morphs into the clash a Jewish Bryn Mawr graduate faking her WASP credentials and a sister who's as New York Jewish as a Hollywood screenwriter can be, a la Larry David. A sister who writes Literature and a brother who writes staged reality shows. A father who's a peacemaker and a mother who's a warrior. Parents who hold back on discussing the family tragedy of an older brother's death, and a child/sibling who wants to be told about her brother. What we have here, to borrow a line from a classic film (the characters would approve), is a failure to communicate, on any level and between any two people in the family. The aunt who wants to share about the girl's brother has her own agenda in telling, and a lack of important facts. The brother who wants to stop his sister from inquiring still wants to know. There's no communication, but there's a powerful lot of noise, with no one listening.

The family dysfunction is bound to trigger explosions when novelist Brooke Wyeth visits Palm Springs from New York for the first time in years after her nervous breakdown. The dysfunction and continual non-communication is fueled by Christmas holiday pressure, alcohol, prescription drugs, less legal substances, and Brooke's new manuscript, a memoir that's a no-holds-barred tell-all about her family and her dead brother.
Astonishingly for a show that's this filled with angst and anger, OTHER DESERT CITIES is also remarkably funny. One-liners fall everywhere, from the light-hearted to the ghoulish, and there are moments that the dysfunction achieves major comic heights - which is harder to achieve than dramatic ones. From the moment that Polly Wyeth, Brooke's mother, decides that "this water needs vodka for flavor," the lines start coming; her best may be "You're never going to meet someone if you keep dressing like a librarian from Kabul."
A play like this deserves a better than merely solid cast, and this production has that as well. Brooke, the New York novelist with a desire to rip bandages off of old wounds, is played by Kim Carson, who nicely straddles the two sides of determination and recent frailty. Parents Polly and Lyman Wyeth, Bryn Mawr-educated scriptwriter and cowboy actor, are Wendy Scharfman and Paul L. Nolan, and they're spectacular, conveying neatly that the two are both birds of a feather and slightly mismatched at the same time. They're high-powered Hollywood Republicans, but she's all rage, perhaps to make up for a career in comedy writing, and he's an instinctive diplomat, anxious not to stir the pot.

Silda, Polly's alcoholic sister (but who in this crowd doesn't drink, smoke, or swallow too much?), is Marcy McGuigan, who is a delight in the part, and Logan James Hall, who won a Broadway World award last year for his work in VENUS IN FUR, is once again displaying his chops as Trip, Brooke's TV writer brother who's not intimidated by his sister's intellectual credentials because he knows there's a place for his work, too. However it's the two sisters, Polly and Silda - Wendy and Marcy - who own this production. Their differences spark not only verbally but almost visibly, and they are spectacular to watch playing against each other. Wendy Scharfman's Polly is a Republican Candace Bergen with snake venom for blood, and McGuigan's Silda is part Jewish Eve Harrington, part comic Wicked Witch, and the combination of these two is combustible. And yes, do fasten your seat belts; it's going to be a bumpy night with these two going at it.

At the Fulton through March 6, and worth getting to see. Visit thefulton.org for tickets and information.

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