Drama Faculty Member’s New Play Opens to Rave Reviews
Playwriting faculty member Jon Robin Baitz‘s new play, Other Desert Cities, recently opened to successful reviews at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. The all-star cast includes Stockard Channing, Stacy Keach, Linda Lavin, Elizabeth Marvel, and Thomas Sadoski. The play is directed by Drama’s 2010’2011 Artist-in-Residence Joe Mantello.
In the play, Brooke (Marvel) returns home to Palm Springs to visit her parents (Channing, Keach) after a six-year absence. A once-promising novelist, Brooke announces to her family the imminent publication of a memoir that dredges up a pivotal and tragic event in the family’s history, a wound that her parents don’t want reopened.
Baitz is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and a winner of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. A founding member and former artistic director of New York’s Naked Angels theater company, Baitz has written a number of acclaimed plays, including The Film Society, The Substance of Fire, Three Hotels, A Fair Country, Ten Unknowns, Mizlansky/Zilinsky, and The Paris Letter. His experience in television includes creating the hit ABC show Brothers & Sisters and serving as executive producer for the first two seasons. He has also written episodes of The West Wing and Alias. His PBS film version of Three Hotels won a Humanitas Award. His other screenplays include The Substance of Fire, based on his play, and People I Know, which starred Al Pacino.
For more information, visit Lincoln Center Theater’s website at www.lct.org.