Other Desert Cities Opens This Week at Asolo

SARASOTA — Asolo Rep's highly-anticipated production of Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities opens this week. Previews will be held on Wednesday and Thursday. Opening night will be on Friday, January 17 at 8 p.m. The show will run through February 27. Baitz is the creator of the hit television show Brothers & Sisters. Other Desert Cities made a big splash when it debuted off-Broadway in 2011, before being named as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and enjoying a successful Broadway Run.

The production will be directed by FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training Director/Associate Artistic Director of Asolo Rep Greg Leaming.

The politically divided and emotionally stunted Wyeth family puts the “fun” in dysfunctional. Former actor-turned-ambassador and Republican Party bigwig Lyman Wyeth and his wife, Polly, live a picturesque life in their very own affluent exile – the Palm Springs Desert. When their daughter, left-winged Brooke, returns home during Christmas of 2004 for the first time in six years, she reveals that she has written a tell-all memoir that discloses the family’s controversial past, including one very painful incident.

This shocking announcement sends the Wyeth family down an emotional spiral where they are forced to revisit and ultimately heal their wounds from the past. Polly’s recovering alcoholic sister, Silda, and Brooke’s TV producer brother, Trip, complete this holiday family reunion.

“In what in many ways is Baitz’s most American play, he has woven a very complex series of relationships in the Wyeth family,” said Leaming. “It’s a very raw, very honest, very funny play – smart, bitter, scathing, really one of this author’s best works. Other Desert Cities is a portrait of a family that is very unique and uniquely American!”

Baitz is one of America's most celebrated playwrights. The Drama Desk Award winner's other works include "A Fair Country", "The Substance of Fire", "Ten Unknowns", "Three Hotels", "The Paris Letter", and "Mizlansky/Zilinsky".

"Jon Robin Baitz’s extraordinary play charts how politics can tear apart a family, and this family is a kind of emblem for America itself. It is painful, hilarious and profound,” said Michael Donald Edwards, Producing Artistic Director of Asolo Rep.

For more information, visit www.asolorep.org/shows/other-desert-cities/2013-2014.