Family politics heat up ‘Other Desert Cities’
Play’s director likes the way audience’s sympathies shift
Dunagan, the Tony Award-winning actress who starred in “August: Osage County” and worked with Ross in the Sydney and London productions of that show). Visiting from New York is their daughter, Brooke (Tracy Michelle Arnold), who has just completed a family memoir, complete with a dark family “secret” from the 1960s. Also on hand is her brother, a reality TV producer, Trip (John Hoogenakker), and Silda (Linda Kimbrough), Polly’s caustic, alcoholic sister, with whom she once penned screenplays. Not surprisingly, sparks fly.
“One of the things that is so interesting to me about this play is the way it generates such shifting sympathies,” said Wishcamper, who grew up in Maine, spent much of his career in New York and recently moved to the South Loop with his wife and two young children. “And to capture that I knew I needed actors who could craft complicated portraits.
“For the older Wyeths, it is When: Where: Tickets: Info: www.GoodmanTheatre.org Run time: funny and useful to think of the Reagans — self-made types, who had careers in Hollywood and politics, and made a decent amount of money along the way, both legitimately and through some sweetheart deals. Robbie [Baitz] writes deeply about family, but there’s also a great deal of talk about friendship in this play — ‘useful friendships’ that are deep, but also deeply pragmatic.”
Wishcamper also sees some correspondences with his own life in the play’s characters.
“My dad grew up in Texas and went to Yale, and while my parents come nowhere close to the social milieu in the play, they were upwardly mobile. And I was born the same year as Trip Wyeth, so I certainly have a comprehension of his and his sister Brooke’s political and social points of view, and an understanding of the war on terror. As their Aunt Silda says in the play, Brooke [the writer] has explained a specific aspect of our national experience, but she has done it specifically by telling the story of her own family. And Robbie has done the same, well aware of the responsibility and power of a writer, and the damage he or she can do.”
In casting the play, Wishcamper very intentionally aimed for an allChicago cast.
“I think the biggest difference between actors here and in New York is the way in which they can build their careers,” said the director, who previously staged the Marx Brothers musical “Animal Crackers” and Horton Foote’s “Talking Pictures” at the Goodman. “They get to have a great deal more time on stage over the course of their careers, and they are considered for far more varied and interesting roles on a regular basis. This has a tremendous effect.”
Deanna Dunagan recalls being “gobsmacked” by Baitz’s play from the moment she first read it.
As she explains: “Having grown up in a tiny town in west Texas, I
familiar with the politics; my father was a Democratic elector who became a ‘compassionate Republican.’ I also know Polly — a Texan who happens to be Jewish, though as the play notes, she ‘became a goy.’ She also is what I would describe as a tough ‘woman of the West.’ ”
Dunagan noted that one of the things that drew her most strongly to the play was that “by the end, although you think you know everyone in the play, you really don’t, especially the three of the older generation.”