Julia Louis-Dreyfus has reached a point in her career where she doesn’t need to do anything for the first time. But on a bright summer afternoon, over a late lunch of pea soup and sashimi, she’s describing not one but two new experiences: preparing for her Broadway debut and attending the Tonys.
The latter was a couple of nights ago. “I don’t mean to sound corny,” Louis-Dreyfus says, obviously moved. “But there’s sort of an earnestness to the theater community that’s beautiful. Everyone knows what the task is. And it’s a mighty task.”
Louis-Dreyfus’s current task is becoming Polly Wyeth, the matriarch of a prominent Palm Springs family, in the revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s 2011 play Other Desert Cities, directed by John Benjamin Hickey and opening at the Hudson Theater in October. At our lunch, in a breezy blue-and-white-striped top and white pants, Louis-Dreyfus has the warmth, charm, and ease that will serve her well as Polly—even if Polly wields these qualities with a scalpel.
Louis-Dreyfus had been looking for the right stage project for years when Other Desert Cities came across her desk. It’s a highly literate play—Baitz’s language is intelligent, witty, and caustic, in the tradition of Edward Albee—and Louis-Dreyfus was captivated. It didn’t hurt that Polly is one of modern theater’s most formidable creations, a country-club conservative with highly trained manners and fortress-like charm.
Short synopsis: It is Christmas Eve 2004, and Polly and Lyman Wyeth’s daughter, Brooke, a writer, has returned home to Palm Springs after six years, joining her sardonic younger brother, Trip, a TV producer, as well as Polly’s sister, Silda, a proud lefty uncertainly attempting sobriety. Having recovered from years of depression—treatment managed and paid for by her parents—Brooke is bearing a hand grenade: the manuscript of her forthcoming memoir (publisher: Knopf; excerpt: The New Yorker). It concerns her brother Henry, who, according to the family story, died in the ’70s by suicide after joining a radical anti-war cult. The memoir is Brooke’s reckoning with that catastrophe (Henry participated in a bombing that killed a man). But some things about the official story still seem incoherent; she doesn’t have all the pieces…and isn’t even sure what the pieces are.
Polly is the custodian of the family narrative, and she and Lyman consider Brooke’s memoir a supreme act of betrayal, disrupting their carefully calibrated equilibrium. Ultimately, though, the play isn’t entirely what it seems, and Baitz saves his most lethal move for the end—a trapdoor that reframes everything that has come before.
This is all wonderfully, wickedly funny. Louis-Dreyfus—beloved as the iconic characters Elaine Benes and Selina Meyer—will be attempting a more dangerous strain of comedy here: intimidating, elegant, poisonous, and entirely emotionally defended. Polly’s humor sits atop tragedy.
The role rang all sorts of bells for Louis-Dreyfus, who grew up in New York and Washington, DC, ground zero for grande dames of the Polly Wyeth sort. “This is a woman who has her hair done a couple times a week. And her nails, the whole deal.” She smiles. “I know these women.”
She is the mother to two grown sons with her husband, Brad Hall, and has been thinking about the weight of parenting a child through crisis. Her own parents—her American mother, Judith (known to listeners of Louis-Dreyfus’s podcast, Wiser Than Me), and her French father, Gérard—divorced when she was young. Louis-Dreyfus understands, from both sides, how family shapes us, and she knows the stakes in the play couldn’t be higher. Brooke’s memoir “is like a murder,” she tells me. “Polly sees it as a killing of what they have.”
