Jon Robin Baitz Jon Robin Baitz

Sometimes the truth is a mirage . By Jon Robin Baitz Arizona Premiere TABLE OF CONTENTS About ATC . 1 Introduction to the Play . 2 Synopsis . 2 RELATIONSHIPS Meet the Characters . 2 ARE HARD- Meet the Playwright . 3 The Rise of the Memoir . 3 EARNED Cultural Context: Vietnam, Ronald Reagan and the War on Terror . .. 4 THINGS. An Exercise in Opposition: Literary Dualism in Other Desert Cities .................. 7 – BROOKE, Glossary and References . 8 OTHER DESERT CITIES Discussion Questions . 13 Other Desert Cities Play Guide written and compiled by Katherine Monberg, ATC Literary Associate; Amber Justmann, Literary Intern; and Natasha Smith, Artistic Intern . Discussion questions provided by April Jackson, Education Manager; Amber Tibbitts and Bryanna Patrick, Education Associates . SUPPORT FOR ATC’S EDUCATION AND COMMUNITY PROGRAMMING HAS BEEN PROVIDED BY: APS JPMorgan Chase The Lovell Foundation Arizona Commission on the Arts John and Helen Murphy Foundation The Marshall Foundation Bank of America Foundation National Endowment for the Arts The Maurice and Meta Gross Foundation Blue Cross Blue Shield Arizona Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture The Max and Victoria Dreyfus Foundation City Of Glendale PICOR Charitable Foundation The Stocker Foundation Community Foundation for Southern Arizona Rosemont Copper The William L . and Ruth T . Pendleton Cox Charities Stonewall Foundation Memorial Fund Downtown Tucson Partnership Target Tucson Medical Center Enterprise Holdings Foundation The Boeing Company Tucson Pima Arts Council Ford Motor Company Fund The Donald Pitt Family Foundation Wells Fargo Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Foundation The Johnson Family Foundation, Inc . ABOUT ATC Arizona Theatre Company is a professional, not-for-profit theatre company . This means all of our artists, administrators and production staff are paid professionals, and the income we receive from ticket sales and contributions goes right back into our budget to create our work, rather than to any particular person as a profit . Each season, ATC employs hundreds of actors, directors and designers from all over the country to create the work you see on stage . In addition, ATC currently employs about 100 staff members in our production shops and administrative offices in Tucson and Phoenix during our season . Among these people are carpenters, painters, marketing professionals, fundraisers, stage directors, computer specialists, sound and light board operators, tailors, costume designers, box office agents, stage crew – the list is endless – representing an amazing range of talents and skills . We are also supported by a Board of Trustees, a group of business and community leaders who volunteer their time and expertise to assist the theatre in financial and legal matters, advise in marketing and fundraising, and help represent the theatre in our community . Roughly 150,000 people attend our shows every year, and several thousand of those people support us with charitable contributions in addition to purchasing their tickets . Businesses large and small, private foundations and the city and state governments also support our work financially . All of this is in support of our vision and mission: OUR VISION IS TO TOUCH LIVES THROUGH THE POWER OF THEATRE. Our mission is to create professional theatre that continually strives to reach new levels of artistic excellence and that resonates locally, in the state of Arizona and throughout the nation . In order to fulfill our mission, the theatre produces a broad repertoire ranging from classics to new works, engages artists of the highest caliber, and is committed to assuring access to the broadest spectrum of citizens . The Temple of Music and Art, the home of ATC shows in downtown Tucson . The Herberger Theater Center, ATC’s performance venue in downtown Phoenix . 1 INTRODUCTION TO THE PLAY Other Desert Cities By Jon Robin Baitz Directed by James Still Actor Paige Lindsey White, who plays Meet the Wyeths, a seemingly perfect upper middle class family replete with wealth, political influence and Brooke Wyeth in ATC’s production of A-list connections, “living the dream” in Palm Springs . That is, until their daughter arrives home for the Other Desert Cities. holidays to reveal the impending publication of her ‘tell-all’ memoir . In this critically acclaimed Broadway hit, the truth crackles with wit, razor-sharp one-liners, a fierce cast of characters and a storyline that grabs you from the opening scene to the riveting conclusion . SYNOPSIS Actor Anne Allgood, Christmas, 2004: the first time in six years that the entire Wyeth family has reunited at Lyman and Polly’s who plays Polly lavish home in Palm Springs to celebrate the holiday . Daughter Brooke returns from New York to a Wyeth in ATC’s concerned family, on edge since Brooke’s full-scale mental breakdown . Alleviating some of the pressure on production of Other Desert Cities. Brooke is Aunt Silda who, after falling into financial ruin from years of alcoholism, has moved in with her sister, Polly . Tensions are high this particular Christmas Eve as everyone awaits the revelation of Brooke’s new manuscript . Brooke’s memoir – not the novel that was so eagerly expected – threatens to expose the family’s darkest secrets, and shake the very foundation of their existence . Rife with the weight of secrets, complicated relationships of love and family, and kaleidoscopic slivers of truth, the family pieces together what really happened in their carefully disguised past and why, ultimately, they are who they are . Actor Lawrence Pressman, who plays Lyman Wyeth in ATC’s production of Other MEET THE CHARACTERS Desert Cities. BROOKE WYETH: A writer, recovering from a recent mental breakdown and attempting to come to terms with the dark side of her childhood in a world of privilege, politics, and wealth; daughter to Polly and Lyman, sister to Trip, and niece to Silda . Actor Will Mobley, LYMAN WYETH: A retired actor and politician known for deep involvement in the GOP and his close who plays Trip friendship with the Reagans; father to Brooke and Trip, and husband to Polly . Wyeth in ATC’s production of Other Desert Cities. POLLY WYETH: A retired screenwriter and socialite with a sharp tongue and forceful personality; Lyman’s wife, mother to Brooke and Trip, and sister to Silda . TRIP WYETH: A reality television producer; younger brother to Brooke, the son of Lyman and Polly . SILDA GRAUMAN: A retired screenwriter and recovering alcoholic, cynical and acerbic, who has recently Actor Robin moved in with Polly and Lyman; sister to Polly, and aunt to Brooke and Trip . Moseley, who plays Silda Grauman in ATC’s production of Other Desert Cities. 2 MEET THE PLAYWRIGHT JON ROBIN BAITZ’S plays include The Film Society, The Substance of Fire, The End of the Day, Three Hotels, A Fair Country (Pulitzer Prize finalist 1996), Mizlansky/Zilinsky, Ten Unknowns, and The Paris Letter, as well as a version of Hedda Gabler (Broadway 2001) . He created Brothers & Sisters, an ABC television series which ran for five seasons until 2011 . Other TV work includes the PBS version of Three Hotels, for which he won the Humanitas Award, and episodes of The West Wing and Alias. He is the author of two screenplays: the film script forThe Substance of Fire (1996) and People I Know (2002) . He is a founding member of Naked Angels Theatre Company, and on the faculties of the MFA programs at The New School for Drama and SUNY Stony Brook/Southampton . Other Desert Cities won the Outer Critics Circle Award in 2011 . Playwright Jon Robin Baitz. THE RISE OF THE MEMOIR As a vehicle of memory, the memoir has long occupied the mysterious and undefined literary space between the hard fact of autobiography and the pure imagination of the novel . Its past is fraught with conflict and contention as it periodically renews the same unanswered questions that have been pondered through the ages, about the nature of truth, reality, and the emotional experience of being human in a tangible world . The memoir first appeared on the timeline of world literature in 371 A .D . with St . Augustine’s Confessions, which articulated the author’s personal story of seeking a higher meaning in his troubled past . In contrast to the already-established traditions of biography, which recounted observable events, St . Augustine became the first western writer to incorporate an invisible, internal experience into a biographical account, as he described his spiritual journey toward salvation . The model of the memoir as a mostly religious description of inner spiritual transformation remained until the sixteenth century when the Protestant Reformation sparked a new purpose: to examine the self from what one scholar has deemed the “unholier-than-thou first-person narrative ”. An excerpt from St. Augustine’s Confessions, generally A more secular form of the memoir emerged in the eighteenth century with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s regarded as the first memoir, from 371 A .D . Confessions, a very different type of “confession” from that of St . Augustine, which shocked Europe’s literary circles with its frank descriptions of the author’s sexual activities . Perhaps more lasting than the scandal of Rousseau’s personal revelations was the new facet that became carved into the identity of the memoir: this new “confession” was about an author’s emotional purge, rather than a story of spiritual redemption or inner transformation . Meanwhile, eighteenth century America began to produce a brand of adventure memoir that documented escapes from oppression and danger, beginning with settler accounts of being captured by “savages” and a later escape . The 1800s then brought an unprecedented political scope to that concept with the emer- gence of the slave narrative, a new kind of escape memoir that translated broad political and social agendas into personal, humanized experiences . These narratives provided the blueprints for the future Jean-Jacques Rousseau, portrait by Maurice Quentin de La Tour, 1753 . His memoir, Confessions, is regarded memoirs of survivors of the Holocaust and other twentieth century genocides that, for the first time, turned as the first secular example of the genre .

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