‘Other Desert Cities’ review: Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Allison Janney’s play has laughs, but no bite

“Other Desert Cities,” like so many plays, is about a family with issues, to say the very least.

A free-spirited Manhattan writer named Brooke jets to sunny Palm Springs to visit her well-to-do mom, dad, TV producer brother and leftist aunt for Christmas. She’s very New York, they’re very California circa 2004.

Her buttoned-up Republican parents were close friends of Ronald and Nancy Reagan from their days working alongside them in Hollywood — mom as a screenwriter with her sister, and dad as an actor like Ronnie.

Now, their downcast daughter has brought along a surprise lump of coal as a present: galleys of her new memoir, which airs their dirtiest laundry. Those toxic pages have the potential to destroy them.

But the likeable enough Broadway revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s sharp-tongued drama, which opened Sunday night at the Hudson Theatre, takes these people’s competing personalities way too far. Quite by accident, everybody in this midcentury modern home — not just Brooke — becomes the black sheep.

Director John Benjamin Hickey’s discordant production starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Allison Janney, Ed Harris, Joe Keery and Lily Rabe fails to click when it’s anything more than one person tossing off mean zingers.

Each actor has their moments, most are fine and one is excellent. Not for a second, however, does anybody believe that the Wyeths are a real family or something other than an impressive assemblage of celebrities.

Making her Broadway debut, Louis-Dreyfus has the toughest assignment as Polly, one of those viperous, monster mothers that are a hallmark of the American theater. The formidable Stockard Channing played her on Broadway last time, and I saw Deanna Dunagan of “August: Osage County” don the tennis dress in Chicago 13 years ago.

Louis-Dreyfus has the requisite comic chops, obviously. She is one of the greatest funnywomen of all time. And you can understand why they’d clamor for the actress who played unhinged VP Selina Meyer to take her on.

After Brooke (Rabe) arrives to a tellingly contrasting image — a spiky Christmas tree situated in front of idyllic palms behind the window — the early goings are terrifically funny.

The “Veep” and “Seinfeld” dynamo can bat a line like “this water needs vodka for flavor” right out of the park.

But once Brooke reveals that the book she’s been working on is not a novel after all, but an explosive tell-all, the jokes subside and the topic of her dead brother Henry bubbles up. The production unfortunately cools down.  

Decades earlier, when Brooke was a little girl, Henry joined an extremist group and later killed himself — a stain on the picture-frame-insert-perfect family. Brooke, who’s been cobbling together magazine travel pieces to make ends meet, has decided to finally use her writing to deal with the trauma of her past, which she believes her parents directly caused. And from there, it’s bombshell, bombshell, bombshell.

Or it should be.

What’s odd is that in this revival, the earth-shaking revelations aren’t as energizing as the earlier one-liners. Sure, the story holds our interest, especially if you don’t know where it’s going. Baitz’s play is twisty. But don’t go in expecting to gasp.

Vital moments aren’t directed tightly or focused enough by Hickey. And his cast seems left to their own devices.

Nobody is bad. But everybody is mismatched and out of sync.

The down-on-the-ranch Harris as Polly’s husband Lyman has that unteachable Robert Redford quality you’d expect of an old-school star who’s taken refuge in the mountains. Unlike Polly, Lyman chooses passivity. And so Harris can get by on presence alone.

Janney brings a much-needed jolt to the large living room as Aunt Silda, a recovering alcoholic who hilariously cuts through Polly’s BS with exceptional wit. That is, until her own wise-cracking character has a life-altering shift and the actress recedes like most everybody else does.  

One person who cannot be marked down for lack of intensity is Rabe, who’s sadly been away from Broadway hiding out in Ryan Murphy’s dungeon for 14 years. Stalking the stage like she’s at an Old West shootout, Rabe is a towering stage presence, and here she goes absolutely nuclear. Yet her enthusiasm creates an equal-but-opposite problem as Louis-Dreyfus’ hesitancy: During the climax, Rabe is in full-Medea mode while the others are quipping away on an episode of “Arrested Development.”  

The strangest thing is that the revival’s stand-out is the guy from “Stranger Things.” Keery, a real talent, plays Brooke’s younger brother Trip, whom the family mocks for being a part of a lousy TV show called “Jury of Your Peers.”

Keery ably commands the stage during his riveting second act speech when Trip finally vomits out his repressed feelings about his screwed-up clan and reveals himself to be the only relative with his head on straight. That scorcher received the only extended applause of the night. Well deserved.

Baitz’s script still shines through, and is a pleasure to watch under the majority of circumstances. But Hickey’s placid revival too easily caves to its environment — dry, beautiful, relaxing and fun — when what it should be doing is fighting like hell against it.