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"It's better this way than the other way," Jon Robin Baitz says. "Than if I had started out in my 20s with Broadway success. I like this trajectory. This play opens on the eve of my 50th birthday. The timing is good. It feels earned."

Baitz is talking about Other Desert Cities, his first Broadway play. (His only other Broadway credit is for his adaptation of Hedda Gabler in 2001.) Cities was a sold-out hit Off-Broadway last season at Lincoln Center, and opens at the Booth Theatre on Nov. 3. Baitz is one of several playwrights, including David Henry Hwang and David Ives, whose careers have largely happened away from the Great White Way but who are on Broadway this fall.

"I'm prouder of Other Desert Cities than of anything else," he says, "because I think I finally managed to put all the pieces together. Not that I understand fully what constitutes a Broadway play and what doesn't — that to me is still somewhat mysterious."

The play, about a rich, politically conservative family and the secrets of its past, stars Stockard Channing, Stacy Keach, Rachel Griffiths, Judith Light and Thomas Sadoski and is directed by Joe Mantello. "It deals with the impossibility of knowing everything about the way in which secrets operate in a family. And it's also another play — about two different kinds of America. About what kind of people we are, what kind of country we are, what our history means" and about "the American dream and how that dream has changed."

Baitz says it's "beautiful" working with Mantello, who was his romantic partner for more than a decade and is a frequent collaborator. "We have a great shorthand. I think somehow his love and commitment to me, on some level, was deeply palpable."

	David Henry Hwang
	photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

David Henry Hwang, whose new play, Chinglish, is his first on Broadway in 13 years, says that for him it's the play that counts, not the destination: "I feel that the work is pretty much the same, trying to create a play. Every now and then, if you're lucky, producers decide this might find a big audience, and you get on Broadway."

Hwang has achieved artistic success on Broadway, especially with his Tony-winning M. Butterfly in 1988 and the Tony-nominated Golden Child in 1998. A two-time Pulitzer finalist, he wrote a revised libretto for the Broadway revival of Flower Drum Song and co-wrote the libretto for Elton John and Tim Rice's Aida. He has written operas and worked in film and television.

Chinglish, now at the Longacre, is a comedy about an American businessman visiting China to make a deal, and the female Chinese vice minister he meets. Performed in English and Mandarin (with surtitles), it deals, he says, with "the difficulties of communication, in terms of language and the way different cultures look at the world.

"On the simplest level, there are the language difficulties. The American says, 'We are a small, family-run firm.' The translator says, 'His company is small and insignificant.'"

Everyone in the play "is trying hard to communicate. Yet there are things we consider universal values, ways of looking at the world, which aren't necessarily the case, which can change culturally. In our culture you're supposed to find someone you love and stay in love, and that's not necessarily true in other cultures. Some people think marriage is not about love — maybe you love somebody in the beginning, but it changes, and love is more about partnership."