Julia Louis-Dreyfus Makes Her Broadway Debut in a Revival That Feels Eerily Current

Julia Louis-Dreyfus walks onto a Broadway stage for the first time and plays a woman who never lets her guard down — and the tension between those two facts turns out to be exactly the point. Her debut in the revival of Jon Robin Baitz's 'Other Desert Cities,' now playing at the Hudson Theatre, is the kind of performance that makes you forget you're watching a first night on a new stage.

The production, directed by John Benjamin Hickey and running through January 17, reunites Louis-Dreyfus with a cast that includes Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Lily Rabe, and Joe Keery — the last of whom is also making his Broadway debut. The revival marks the play's return to Broadway since its 2011 premiere, which starred Stockard Channing.

The setup is a pressure cooker dressed as a holiday gathering. It is Christmas 2004, and Brooke Wyeth (Rabe) has come home to her parents' Palm Springs house carrying a manuscript — a memoir that threatens to expose the family's buried history. Her parents, Lyman (Harris) and Polly (Louis-Dreyfus), are one-time Hollywood fixtures who followed their friends, the Reagans, into politics. One of their sons was involved in a domestic terror attack before killing himself; the public has largely forgotten, but the family has not.

Polly's live-in sister Silda (Janney), a recovering alcoholic and former writing partner, shares Brooke's conviction that the family's self-interest caused its collapse — a conviction that animates the memoir. Brooke's brother Trip (Keery), a reality TV producer too young to remember his brother's death, keeps one foot out of the fight and a handful of flight options ready.

Louis-Dreyfus is impeccable, her turns to iciness genuinely chilling as a study of propriety in action; the venom she struggles to hold back seeping through her teeth.— Reviewer

Harris, according to The Guardian, brings 'born star-gravitas and voice' to the patrician Lyman, making the cracks in his steeliness all the more affecting. Keery, in a role that could easily be a placeholder, earns what the same review calls 'this season's Alden Ehrenreich award for best revelation who should never leave the stage.' Janney is praised as 'expectedly great' in the sardonic Silda, though The Guardian notes she may be 'too innately lovable for a character who could benefit from darker shading.'

The production is not without reservations. Brooke, the play's central figure, is identified by The Guardian as something of an Achilles heel — 'continuously, improbably shocked that a mother should be concerned about her daughter's upcoming tell-all.' The same review notes that both Rabe and Janney tilt the scales toward their characters' version of events, leaving them as 'essentially faultless characters' when the material might demand more complexity.

What reviewers broadly agree on is the production's timeliness. Baitz wrote the play during the US withdrawal from Iraq, and set it in the year after the Dixie Chicks had their music career derailed by anti-war comments. Its jabs at Reagan-era politics and celebrities turned politicians, once the bread-and-butter of safe liberalism, now carry what The Guardian calls 'calamitous prescience.' The play premiered in 2011, during what the same review describes as 'the relative safety of Obama's third year in office.' The distance between then and now is part of what the revival is selling.

The question hovering over theater today: will anyone stage a play about the war we're actually fighting?— Reviewer

The revival nearly made $2 million in its first week of previews, according to Playbill. A special performance benefiting the Entertainment Community Fund has also been announced. The production runs at the Hudson Theatre, 141 W. 44th St., New York, through January 17.

Why it matters — A Pulitzer-nominated play about political families and buried secrets, written during the Iraq war, has returned to Broadway with one of the most-watched casts in years — and reviewers say it reads less like a period piece than a warning.

Reported by variety.com, playbill.com, deadline.com, theguardian.com