By Christopher Wallenberg
22 Dec 2011
Brooke's staunchly conservative parents, longtime pals of Ron and Nancy Reagan, are living out their twilight years in the Palm Springs desert. The family patriarch, Lyman (Stacy Keach), was a gunslinging Hollywood character actor who transformed himself into a successful politician and Reagan acolyte, serving as GOP chairman and U.S. ambassador under the conservative icon. Backing up Lyman is his steely, wisecracking wife, Polly (Stockard Channing), a woman who's helmet-headed hair is as hard-edged as her bedside manner. Along for the ride is their affable reality-TV producer son Trip (Thomas Sadoski) and Polly's sister/sparring partner Silda (Judith Light), a recovering alcoholic whose unabashedly liberal politics are as sharp as her scathing wit. (Snaps a sneering Silda to Polly: "Honey, this Pucci is a lot more real than your Pat Buckley shtick.")
Griffiths and Stockard Channing in Other Desert Cities. photo by Joan Marcus
Other Desert Cities premiered at Lincoln Center Theater's Off-Broadway space last winter. But when the play landed on Broadway this fall, Griffiths took over the role of Brooke from Elizabeth Marvel, with Light replacing the estimable Linda Lavin. When Marvel decided not to do the Broadway transfer, playwright Baitz offered the part to Griffiths, who he had worked with closely on "Brothers and Sisters," a show he created for ABC.
Griffiths describes the Baitz play as a "chamber piece," with each actor functioning as a musician who takes the melody of the piece for a while and runs with it. "It's a baton, and somebody passes that melody back, and you pick it up. And then it has these two big mountains that we have to climb — a little mountain at the end of the first act, and then this big mountain at the end of the second — which are classical in their proportions and drive in a way…where you're sustaining emotion and language at a really high pitch."
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| Griffiths in Other Desert Cities. |
| photo by Joan Marcus |
Griffiths saw the original production last winter at Lincoln Center, so she sensed that the role of Brooke was totally within her range. "But I knew I'd have to scale up to pull off the big crescendos that Elizabeth did. Having seen her do it, she kind of paved the way. Like 'Oh, okay, I'll have to do that. Otherwise the play won't work.' But I wasn't used to doing [these big crescendos]. Maybe for three lines I was used to doing that — but not for a full page."
"[Director] Joe [Mantello] and Robbie were telling me, 'You're not getting the writer thing. The mother thing is coming. The betrayal's coming [through]. The grief [part] is coming. The rawness of this is coming. The being-part-of-the-family is coming. You know, your [relationship with your] daddy's coming. The cost of giving up this family [part] is coming. But you're not getting the writer.' Which is 'the head' part of it. The heart stuff I really understood…I haven't read a lot since my kids were born. So I think I'd really forgotten a lot about writing. How writers think. How they justify the books they write. How they hurt people in the writing of those books. How despite that, we're often glad they wrote them.
"I've kind of been dismissing a little bit the importance of her book. So I stepped that up. And then the night before opening, I was like, There's something I'm not getting about this woman," she says, with a whisper. "And then it just came to me in an epiphany. I was like, 'Oh my god, she doesn't have kids. I have children. She doesn't have children.' And as much as you understand the juggling of a working mom, the working artist is a whole other thing. Because the truth is, once you have children, you tend to continue to work, but it's extremely hard to work in that maniacal way — of which most truly good work is born. Particularly, I think, in writing, because it requires you to isolate yourself and not engage."
Continued...
