Next on our stage:

CALENDAR GIRLS IDEATION FRANKENSTEIN NOV. 17-DEC. 18 JAN. 19-FEB. 19 MARCH 23-APRIL 23 HIGHLIGHTS

Lyman (Jeff Kramer) comforts daughter Brooke (Lauren Tothero), whose tell- all memoir is stirring up major family drama, as Brooke’s mother Polly (Mary Gibboney) looks on. All “Other Desert Cities” show photos by Taylor Sanders.

A companion guide to Other Desert Cities By Jon Robin Baitz Sept. 22-Oct. 23, 2016 Synopsis

The Wyeth family is home for the holidays on Christmas Eve 2004. But seasonal cheer quickly dissolves when daughter Brooke announces she is publishing a memoir that dredges up a tragic event from the family’s past, a wound no one else wants reopened.

Soon, political differences, all-but- forgotten slights and painful memories become weapons in an unforgettable war of wit and words that threatens to shatter the family. Smart, powerful and surprisingly funny, Other Desert Cities was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2012.

Characters Brooke Wyeth (Lauren Tothero): Described in the script as “an attractive and dry woman,” Brooke left the West Coast years ago to live the writer’s life in New York. Leery of NYC in these post-9/11 times, her parents Polly and Lyman are not thrilled about this.

Polly Wyeth (Mary Gibboney): “Elegant and forthright and whip-smart,” says the script. Polly and Lyman also hold very different political beliefs than their liberal children. We’re talking buddies with the Reagans.

Lyman Wyeth (Jeff Kramer): “Oak-like … sturdy in the way of old Californians of Silda (Karen DeHart) enjoys some well-deserved laughs with nephew Trip (Sean Okuniewicz) in the a particular age.” Lyman has a warm midst of a, shall we say, difficult family Christmas. relationship with Brooke and is quietly torn about the memoir.

Silda Grauman (Karen DeHart): Polly’s sister, Silda is a vivacious, disheveled recovering alcoholic who is not afraid to tell the truth, no matter how painful.

Trip Wyeth (Sean Okuniewicz): A “bright, funny” young man about a decade younger than his sister, Trip creates court TV shows of dubious quality and is always ready with a quick word. Christmas in the desert(s) With Other Desert Cities, playwright Jon Robin Baitz sets us down in a very specific time and place: Christmas Eve morning 2004, in the affluent Palm Springs home of Lyman and Polly Wyeth. We see mid-century style and a conservative Hollywood feel, which is not surprising, since Polly once wrote movies and Lyman was, as his son puts it, “a gunslinger and a gumshoe at Paramount.”

This is an election year not long after 9/11, and the family is just as divided as the country. Lyman was once the GOP chair, and Polly quit writing for the movies once the MGM writers’ stable became all about “drugs and lefties whining.” Meanwhile, their children are anything but conservative. Brooke became a writer off in New York. Trip is in California producing a reality-TV courtroom show.

As the Wyeths try to find common ground and enjoy a holiday together in Palm Springs, the outside world keeps intruding in the form of wars and politics. As U.S. troops still remain in “other desert cities” in Iraq, Polly and Lyman speak admiringly of Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld. Polly worries that Brooke will face another terrorist attack in New York.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld greets the troops in Iraq on Christmas Eve 2004. Most dramatically, with Brooke’s announcement that she’s publishing a tell-all memoir about the family, everyone’s attention is pulled back to the Vietnam War. That’s when Henry, Polly and Lyman’s oldest son, violently opposed the war and lost his life under dark circumstances.

One of the reasons Brooke left the West Coast, she says, is: “the weather that never changes. I need seasons to mark where I am.”

There is, however, nothing predictable about Jon Robin Baitz’s Palm Springs or the people who live in it. This is a tumultuous, witty, and surprisingly funny play, with secrets revealed, family alliances forged and tested, and new revelations that just may turn Wyeth history upside down.

President George W. Bush just before giving his “Mission Brooke titles her memoir Love & Mercy. The family is going to need Accomplished” speech about the Iraq war in 2003. ample helpings of both to get through this Christmas.

“Yep, that’s the downfall of us all, Polly, lefties whining all over the place. I gotta go. I don’t want to be late for my conference call with Al Qaeda.” -Brooke About the playwright, Jon Robin Baitz Jon Robin Baitz’s plays are known for their intelligent dialogue, compelling moral issues, and family dynamics that are at the same time unusual and deeply relatable. His best-known work, Other Desert Cities epitomizes all three facets.

A native of Los Angeles, Baitz had a far-flung upbringing as the son of a peripatetic executive, living in Brazil and South Africa before returning to attend Beverly Hills High. He put one of his childhood settings to paper in an early play, 1994’s A Fair Country.

In this drama, an archeologist recalls his trouble with his mother, which started when the family lived in South Africa years before. The play takes audiences to the Hague and the Mexican jungle, tracing the tumultuous lives of diplomats and world travelers. The New York Times called it one of the best contemporary American plays in recent memory, saying, “Mr. Baitz has moral ambition…and he knows that words maim as much as sticks and stones ever did.”

Baitz’s other plays have also been widely praised, earning him honors as a Drama Desk award- Jon Robin Baitz. winner and a Guggenheim and NEA Fellow. Scripts include The Substance of Fire, Ten Unknowns, Mizlansky/Zilinsky, The Paris Letter, and Three Hotels.

In the TV world, Baitz has written for The West Wing, and is the creator of the family drama Brothers & Sisters. Ultimately, he clashed with ABC executives who wanted the show to turn brighter and lighter, and he left Hollywood to return to theater. Besides his successful writing career, he also plays a role in academia, serving as department head of the MFA Playwriting program at the New School.

Meet our director, John McCluggage We’re proud to welcome veteran theater creator John McCluggage to City Lights as director of Other Desert Cities. It’s hard to believe this is John’s first time directing at City Lights, since he's a friend and familiar face to many of us in San Jose’s theater community. Overall, he has more than 30 years of experience as a director, actor, and teaching artist.

From 1989 to 2006, John was associate artistic director at San Jose Repertory Theatre. He founded Red Ladder Theatre Company in 1992, and produces and directs ShakesBEERience, a quarterly, free, informal staged reading held at Cafe Stritch on South First Street.

John enjoys using his background as an actor to augment his directing work. “I hope that I would be considered an actor’s director. I do understand the process that they need to go through,” he said. Acting, he added, is "just a really hard thing to do…to find the truth, to find the dynamic between opposites. … I respect that, and I think as a director, I hope, I encourage them to explore that, and support them in that.”

Working with both Shakespeare and contemporary scripts is also a comfortable mix for John: he approaches both with a focus on the language. He recently laid out this approach in a TV appearance on Peninsula Backstage. (Watch the show at bit.ly/ODConTV.) John McCluggage.

“There is a process in Shakespeare where sometimes you literally have to sit there and go, ‘What does this mean?’ And then once you get the contextual sense of it, how do you play it for real? The same thing happens in a contemporary play. It just matters that we have a shorthand, because we all know the language,” John said.

“But Baitz in particular is a specific kind of playwright. He’s really wonderful. And the way he uses language and repeats words, you have to be aware of what he’s doing. So the same process once you break it down, to be aware of the character and the dramatic structure, is the same as it is in Shakespeare.” Another CLTC newcomer: Lauren Tothero as Brooke Our cast has several familiar faces, including Sean Okuniewicz, who just played St. Jimmy in the summer musical Green Day’s American Idiot. He’s not wearing nearly as much eyeliner this time.

We also have a City Lights newcomer who hails from Texas by way of Los Angeles, where she’s now based. A recent graduate of the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Lauren Tothero is excited to play daughter Brooke.

How did she end up in the Bay Area? It’s kind of a funny story. She and her boyfriend, whose relatives live in the East Bay, were in town for a family event. Then Lauren saw a notice for Theatre Bay Area auditions at City Lights. After auditioning, she quickly got a call from John McCluggage, who wanted her to read for Other Desert Cities. And here she is.

Brooke has been a fascinating character to explore for Lauren, from her dry wit and charm to the depression she struggles with. Lauren has also found the script a meaty mix of drama, tragedy, and surprising amounts of humor, with "Sorkin-esque" dialogue.

"It's just so true to what a family is," Lauren said. "They have these huge arguments, but every single character tells the other that they love them.” Lauren adds that the small cast of five and City Lights' close-up stage add to the intimacy. "You are in their living room with them.”

Coincidentally, Lauren is also a writer. She once wrote for a theater Lauren Tothero as Brooke. website and also explores poetry. While she has never dropped a tell-all family memoir, she has some experience tackling tough topics. In college, she wrote several articles about the struggle that many actors and actresses have with body image. Some of the pieces were quite personal. “It can be super-scary… feeling that moment where this will be scary to write, but thinking that it will help other people,” she said.

As she continues in her acting career, Lauren is looking forward to next spring, when she’ll be back in New York in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. She and her identical twin sister, Sierra, will play the lead roles of Viola and Sebastian at Queens Theatre in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Sierra has also studied acting — at the Globe Theatre, no less — and the sisters are thrilled to work together for the first time in years.

What does the play’s title mean? The answer is on the freeway. On Interstate 10 in Southern California, you can head eastbound and see a sign that gives you the choice of going toward Palm Springs or “Other Desert Cities.”

Other Desert Cities on the Great White Way Early on, it was clear that Other Desert Cities was going to be a hit for Jon Robin Baitz and its powerhouse ensemble cast. The play took the stage off-Broadway in 2011 at Lincoln Center Theater, earning raves for its script and cast, who included Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach.

The road to Broadway was paved, and later that year the play opened at the Booth Theatre on Broadway, where it ran for 261 performances and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Other Desert Cities, the Washington Post noted, “might have won both that and the Tony for best play were it not for a critical juggernaut by the title of Clybourne Park.”

On Broadway, Channing and Keach continued playing the roles of Polly and Lyman Wyeth, to high acclaim. The New York Times said Channing gave her best performance since John Guare’s 1990 play Six Degrees of Separation.

“This actress is so good that you don't even realize how good she is while you’re watching her,” the Times’ Ben Brantley wrote. “The same might be said of Mr. Baitz’s play. Built with gleaming dialogue, tantalizing hints of a dangerous mystery and a structural care that brings to mind the heyday of Lillian Hellman, Cities has the appeal of a Broadway hit from another age.”

(We recommend clicking over to Brantley’s review, which also includes a video Judith Light in 2015. Photo by Greg Hernandez. clip from the Broadway production. We’ve created a short link at bit.ly/ODConBroadway.)

Rachel Griffiths from TV’s Brothers & Sisters, which Baitz created, played Brooke on Broadway, with Thomas Sadoski as Trip and Judith Light as Silda. Light, by the way, won the Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play.

The wisdom of Silda

Hands down, the character of Silda, Polly’s sister, has some of the best lines in the play. Clearly, actor Karen DeHart is having a blast. Here are a few quotes:

“They gave me this Antabuse stuff. You know what it is? If you drink, you can’t stop throwing up, believe me, I’ve weighed the options.”

“I had to fight off three vultures for this Pucci. It was like something out of National Geographic.”

“Telling the truth is a very expensive hobby.”

Karen DeHart as Silda at City Lights. City Lights Theater Company presents Other Desert Cities from Sept. 22 through Oct. 23, 2016. Shows are Thursday-Saturday at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m. (no show Sept. 25). The theater is at 529 S. Second St. in San Jose. Details: cltc.org, 408-295-4200.

Other Desert Cities by Jon Robin Baitz

Director: John McCluggage

Scenic Design/Production Manager/ Technical Director: Ron Gasparinetti Lighting Design: Nick Kumamoto Costume Design: Amy Zsadanyi-Yale Sound Design: George Psarras Properties Designer: Miranda Whipple Stage Manager: Joseph Hidde Assistant Stage Manager: Miranda Caravalho

Special thanks to Linda Whipple and Ting Na Wang.

Featuring: Lauren Tothero, Mary Gibboney, Jeff Kramer, Karen DeHart and Sean Okuniewicz.

Lyman (Jeff Kramer) has a moment with daughter Brooke (Lauren Tothero).

Highlights is researched and written by City Lights dramaturg Rebecca Wallace. Read past issues, and a digital version of this issue, at cltc.org/highlights.