Other Desert Cities - SpeakEasy Stage

SpeakEasy Stage

Everyone has their own version of the truth. That truth is culled from conversations, past accounts, honed by self-experience. Nurture or nature, perhaps both create the end result. And so it is in Jon Robin Baitz 2011 play, Other Desert Cities.

Set in 2004 and in 2011, Brook Wyeth, daughter of two successful Hollywood actors - staunch Republicans who count the Regan and elder Bush family as dinner companions – arrives home for Christmas with a tell-all family memoir six years in the making. It describes her truth, which as the program notes say, ‘turns out to be a lie’. So fear not, I will give no more away.

The early scenes are dominated by false bonhomie, over the top, humor largely at the expense of Jewish mothers, Republicans and rather strangely, ‘The British’. This is of course to lull the audience into believing they are watching a sit-com type comedy of the sort that can only last one one season using stereotype acting and dialogue. Brooks alcoholic aunt brings another stereotype to the stage and her shrieks and antics contribute further to audience mood ripe for plunder.

For my part, I found myself reaching for the non-existent remote for a channel change until Baintz adds the first twist in a scene with Brooks and her brother. Previously only hinted at, we discover that an elder brother not only committed suicide, but had taken a minor role in a Venice Beach terrorist cell, complicit in bombing a military recruitment office in which the janitor perished.

The rest of the play deals with the fallout from Brooks manuscript and her belief that her parents drove her brother away when he needed help and are culpable in his taking his own life.

It’s tough to be a witness a family self-destruct, swaying between accusation, recrimination, hatred, loathing and despair. It must be even tougher to act it night after the night. The cast manage reasonably well, but for me, there seemed to be too much standing around, gazing blankly, angrily or with some other form of facial emotion, whilst the on-stage character sullied forth with their monologue.

I know from my own experience that some truths are best kept in the family, if not inside one’s own mind, just in case they be not the truth at all.

Invisible Man Makes a Worthy Apearance

Huntington Theater

"I am an Invisible Man," the opening line in Ralph Waldo Ellison's classic American novel, hangs in the air, waiting for a challenge, reverberating through the slowly quieting audience.
A black man stands on stage, clad in a white singlet, surrounded by a set representing his Harlem basement hiding place in the 1930's.
And so begins nearly three hours of fast paced, racy and at times difficult to grasp dialogue, ripped from a age and place few have traveled or even care to acknowledge.
Perhaps high schools teach Ellison's novel. If not they should, difficult as it may be, his work depicts a history that is uncomfortable and, like my adopted nation, still a work in progress.
With powerful and sustained cast performances, sets so incredible that I so want to photograph them as backdrops, it not only blazes to life in the Huntington Theater's production, but drives deep into the emotional core.
At times during the performance I felt deeply ashamed, none less so than when the Invisible Man speaks directly to the audience, fully exposed under house lights. Perhaps it's the fading echoes from the sins of our fathers, for surely all of our ancestors have acted themselves at some point in history in ways that  we today  regard as misguided.
I wish I could have slowed down some of the scenes, replayed them as with a book or a DVD, to grasp more fully the eloquence of both words and actions.
The final line from the Invisible Man rings as true today as it did then,

“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” 

Theater at its best and equal to any I have seen in London or New York.