Other Desert Cities

Other Desert Cities puts a family in one room at Christmas and hands the daughter a loaded weapon: the manuscript of a memoir about her dead brother, which she intends to publish, and which will say in public what her parents have spent decades keeping private.

Brooke has not written anything in years and has been unwell. What she has finished is an account of her older brother's radicalisation, his part in a bombing, and his suicide. Her parents, retired, conservative and formidable, want it stopped. Her younger brother wants everyone to calm down. Her aunt, newly sober and with old scores to settle, wants it published. Every one of them is partly right.

Jon Robin Baitz wrote the play, which first opened in 2011 and moved quickly to a larger stage on the strength of its reception. It belongs to a recognisable tradition, the family gathering that turns into an inquest, but it refuses to make the argument one-sided. The parents are given the best lines and the strongest case.

The pleasure is verbal. These are articulate people who have been rehearsing their positions for years, and the play lets them go at each other with real wit before the ground shifts. When the withheld fact finally arrives, it reframes everything said before it, and the audience is left rearranging the whole argument in retrospect.

It is for anyone who has sat at a table with people they love and cannot agree with. The reason it works live is that the audience keeps changing sides, and in a full room you can feel exactly when it happens.