Other Desert Cities

Winner of the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama

On Christmas Eve, the sun-lit Palm Springs home of a politically connected family becomes a battleground of memory, loyalty, and legacy

In Pulitzer Prize finalist Other Desert Cities, Brooke Wyeth returns home to Palm Springs to visit her parents after a six-year absence. A once-promising novelist, she announces to her family the imminent publication of a memoir dredging up a pivotal and tragic event in the family's history — a wound that her parents don't want reopened. Brooke has come home to draw a line in the sand and is daring her family to cross it. Her brother won't play her game; her aunt knows way too much, and her parents fall into all their old routines as they plead with her to keep their story quiet. In this family, secrets are currency and everyone is rich.

Other Desert Cities is a play about a girl who comes home to the desert with a story about where she is from and who she thinks her family really is. Her parents represent an establishment that she feels has betrayed America. She goes to war with them and blood is spilled in a play "with gleaming dialogue [and] tantalizing hints of a dangerous mystery." (The New York Times).