this week in theater

OTHER DESERT CITIES

Secrets and lies unfold on Christmas Eve in Jon Robin Baitz’s exceptional Broadway drama OTHER DESERT CITIES (photo by Joan Marcus)

Booth Theatre
222 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday, $61.50 – $126.50
www.lct.org

It’s Christmas Eve, 2004, and the Wyeth clan has gathered together to celebrate the holiday in Palm Springs, where WASPy parents Polly (Stockard Channing) and Lyman (Stacy Keach) raised their family, playing tennis and hanging out at the country club. Joining them is daughter Brooke (Rachel Griffiths), son Trip (Thomas Sadoski), and Polly’s sister, Silda Grauman (Judith Light). What transpires over the course of the next two hours is a classic tale of family dysfunction, filled with secrets and lies, masterfully told by playwright Jon Robin Baitz and director Joe Mantello. Other Desert Cities unfolds on John Lee Beatty’s wonderful set, a modern living room complete with working fireplace, tall windows that look out at the desert wasteland, and a long stone wall that seems to trap the family inside, combining California warmth with an icy coldness. After six years of writer’s block and months hospitalized for depression, Brooke has emerged with the follow-up to her successful debut novel, but it’s not fiction. This time she has written a tell-all memoir about the one thing the family never talks about and which brought them great public shame and embarrassment — eldest son Henry, a deeply troubled young man who joined an anarchist cult and participated in a terrorist attack that killed an innocent man, leading him to take his own life.

Former Hollywood players Polly and Lyman are true believers who have counted the Bushes and Reagans as close personal friends; in fact, Polly proudly declares that Nancy is her role model. While the parents are in favor of the Iraq war, Brooke and Silda, a recovering alcoholic, are vigilant lefties; Trip, a reality-TV producer, does his best to remain in the center, desperately trying to keep all conversations away from politics. But he has a lot more trouble attempting to be the voice of reason as long-held secrets emerge that threaten to tear the family apart. Other Desert Cities is everything a play should be: Sharp, incisive dialogue, nearly flawless acting, and seamless, flowing direction, with a laugh-out-loud first act and a much darker, far more serious second act. A Lincoln Center Theater production that originally ran at the Mitzi E. Newhouse this past January and February (and that also starred Channing, Keach, and Sandoski, with Linda Lavin as Silda and Elizabeth Marvel as Brooke), Other Desert Cities is an exceptional piece of work, an intelligent, thought-provoking drama that melds the political and the personal in thrilling ways.

RELATIVELY SPEAKING: 3 ONE-ACT COMEDIES

Doreen (Marlo Thomas) and Carla (Lisa Emery) try to figure out what to do with George in Elaine May’s GEORGE IS DEAD

Brooks Atkinson Theatre
256 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Opens Thursday, October 20, $65-$135 (October 14 performance reviewed)
www.relativelyspeakingbroadway.com

“I don’t have the depth to feel this bad,” Doreen (Marlo Thomas) says in the second of three one-act comedies that make up Relatively Speaking, which opened October 20 at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. While the trio of short plays that deal with family — by writers much better known for their film work — might lack depth individually and as a group, two of the three don’t have much to feel bad about it. The evening opens with Oscar winner Ethan Coen’s (Fargo, No Country for Old Men) extremely slight Talking Cure, which is divided into two sections that feel like they were vignettes that Coen couldn’t think of how to use elsewhere so he threw them together here and hoped for the best. In the first part, Danny Hoch plays a patient in a mental institution trying to convince a psychiatrist (Jason Kravits) that there is nothing wrong with him. The second part reveals why he just might be crazy, flashing back to his parents (Katherine Borowitz and Allen Lewis Rickman) having an argument about Hitler. (Rickman replaced A Serious Man’s Fred Melamed, who left over creative differences with Coen. One can see why.)

After a four-minute pause, Elaine May’s (A New Leaf, Heaven Can Wait) George Is Dead begins, set in a small, cramped New York City apartment where Doreen barges in on Carla (Lisa Emery) in the middle of the night. Doreen announces that her husband has just died — and that she has left him in a Colorado hotel room because she doesn’t know what to do. A wealthy socialite wearing a glittering dress, Doreen has unexpectedly turned to the daughter of her old nanny (Patricia O’Connell), who is not exactly thrilled to suddenly have to take care of her former nemesis. Thomas gives a breathless tour-de-force performance as the ditzy, discombobulated Doreen; at one point she says to Carla, who is in the midst of an awful fight with her husband (Grant Shaud), “You’re so dear. Am I being too horribly demanding? Am I being awful? I can never tell.” The play’s final scene seems tacked on and unnecessary, but the rest of it is a small pleasure.

Nina (Ari Graynor) and Jerry (Steve Guttenberg) set in motion a farcical family drama in Woody Allen’s HONEYMOON MOTEL

Following a fifteen-minute intermission, Woody Allen’s (Annie Hall, Crimes and Misdemeanors) Honeymoon Motel takes over, a drawing-room farce that pays tribute to the Marx Brothers’ classic stateroom scene from A Night at the Opera. Jerry Spector (a solid Steve Guttenberg) and the much younger Nina (Ari Graynor) arrive at a wonderfully cheesy Vegas-like motel room (courtesy of set designer Santo Loquasto), apparently to consummate their marriage, but it turns out that Jerry is actually the stepfather of the groom (Bill Army) and has fallen in love with the sexy blonde. As the room slowly fills up with the whole mishpucha — Mark-Linn Baker and Julie Kavner as Nina’s dysfunctional parents; Caroline Aaron as Judy, the groom’s overbearing mother; Kravits as Jerry’s shrink; Hoch as the pizza delivery guy; and Richard Libertini as a tipsy rabbi — Allen lets the Borscht Belt one-liners flow, with more hits than misses. “What did I do? You two were planning on divorce anyway,” Nina says. “We were? It’s news to me,” responds Judy. “I never said divorce,” adds Jerry. “I was thinking of faking my own death.” After Judy calls Jerry’s best friend, Ed (Shaud), an enabler, Ed says, “Enabler? I was trying to talk him out of it when you came.” Judy: “You’re the first one that told him about sex in a Jacuzzi.” Ed: “I’ve never been in a Jacuzzi in my life.” Judy: “Well, he made me try it and we ended up dialing 911.” Jerry: “She accused me of waterboarding her.” Not exactly high-brow humor, but a lot of fun, even if Libertini’s rabbi falls flatter than a Kol Nidre pledge speech. Directed by John Turturro, who has appeared in films by Coen and Allen, Relatively Speaking is like a family reunion, complete with its fair share of ups and downs, touching moments and long-simmering arguments, at least one or two people you’d rather not see, and enough laughs to make you glad you went.

LAST CHANCE: JERUSALEM

Tony winner Mark Rylance and JERUSALEM end dazzling Broadway run this Sunday

The Music Box
239 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eight Ave.
Through Sunday, August 21, $61.50 – $226.50
www.jerusalembroadway.com

British actor Mark Rylance (Boeing Boeing) won his second Tony award for his epic performance as drug-and-booze-addled Johnny “Rooster” Byron in Jez Butterworth’s brilliant Jerusalem. As the play opens, Rooster is hosting a loud, blasting rave at his home, an old Airstream in the woods on the outskirts of a community that wants him gone. The trailer is marked “Waterloo,” an ever-present reminder of Rooster’s continuing downfall. The three-hour play takes place on St. George’s Day, the annual holiday celebrating the legendary dragon killer on which the William Blake hymn “Jerusalem” is traditionally sung (“I will not cease from Mental Fight / Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand: / Till we have built Jerusalem / In England’s green and pleasant land”). Rooster has been served with an eviction notice, but he pays it no mind, ready to fight the power as he entertains his minions (a very motley, colorfully costumed crew that includes original Office sycophant Mackenzie Crook as would-be DJ Ginger, Alan David as the Professor, Jay Sullivan as Lee, Danny Kirrane as Davey, Molly Ranson as Pea, and Charlotte Mills as Tanya) with mad tales of fairies and giants told with a Falstaffian gallantry that mixes in plenty of Don Quixote and Baron Munchausen.

The Shakespearean play takes a turn from the bawdy to the serious when Rooster’s ex-girlfriend (Geraldine Hughes) and their young son, Marky (alternately Aiden Eyrick or Mark Page), show up, expecting Rooster to take the boy to the local fair. But Rooster is in no condition to play dad at this point and casts his family away, and he is soon plummeting for rock bottom after learning a nasty secret about his supposedly loyal followers. The former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, Rylance is spectacular as Rooster, embodying the larger-than-life character with his every movement, from his severe limp to his magical intonation. Swiftly directed by Ian Rickson and also featuring Aimeé-Ffion Edwards as a missing girl who opens each act in song, Jerusalem is a must-see production that is ending its four-month run at the Music Box on Sunday. Tickets are still available at the box office and at the TKTS booth; don’t miss this last chance to experience this dazzling production, led by an unforgettable performance by a master craftsman.

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA

Hugh Panaro and Sara Jean Ford lead the current cast of Broadway’s PHANTOM OF THE OPERA

Majestic Theatre
247 West 44th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tickets: $26.50 – $226.50
www.thephantomoftheopera.com

On January 26, 1988, THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s London smash, opened on the Great White Way, presented by Cameron Mackintosh and the Really Useful Theatre Company and directed by Hal Prince. On November 29 of this year, PHANTOM, which won seven Tonys, including Best Musical, staged its 9,500th performance, extending its record as the longest running show in Broadway history. And having seen its latest incarnation on December 28, we can’t for the life of us figure out how. The two-and-a-half-hour spectacle is far from spectacular; it’s poorly paced, has plot holes you could crash a giant chandelier through, and contains not a single memorable song. The sets are adequate at best, the performances Gilbert & Sullivan-lite. The current cast features Hugh Panaro as the fourteenth Phantom, Sean McLaughlin as Raoul (we saw Paul A. Schaeffer, who usually plays the marksman), Sara Jean Ford as Christine (sharing the role each week with Marni Raab), and Liz McCartney as Carlotta, but they are hamstrung by Charles Hart’s lyrics, Richard Stilgoe’s book, Sir Andrew’s music, and the generally uninspiring staging and sets. Gaston Leroux’s 1909-10 serialized novel about a mysterious figure haunting the Paris Opera House has been turned into numerous films and plays, but it’s a shame that this dreary operetta is the one that seems to have most captured the public’s imagination.