Wil Brintnall
Professor Gwilt
Theater 1030
September 17, 2014
Other Desert Cities Other Desert Cities is a play about Brooke Wyeth’s most recent work, and her families reaction to her writing. The play begins with an introduction of the Wyeth family, and begins to reveal the past that Brooke is writing about. One of the first things that the audience finds out about the Wyeth family is their political differences that are related to Polly and Lyman’s past with the Nazi regime. After the audience finds out about Polly and Lyman’s political involvement they are immediately told of a sibling, Henry, who was involved in a public bombing, and after accidently killing a Vietnam War veteran, took his own life. Brooke tells her parents about her plans to publish her book, and they react in a negative way, and tell her that she is affecting others by publishing her book, and also bringing up a past that they, her parents, have been trying to forget. Brooke’s parents are also upset because she blames them for her brother’s suicide, and they don’t want the negative attention that would come with that claim. Brooke presses her parents to defend themselves and to prove that they are not the reason for her brother’s suicide. Her parents begin revealing information about the events of Henry’s death, and Brooke struggles to understand why they kept the information from her. Throughout the remainder of the play, it is revealed that everyone but Brooke was in on Henry’s situation, even her aunt who played along with her narration. Brooke is finally told that her brother is not dead, but instead was smuggled onto a boat by her father to protect their family and her brother. At the end of the play, Brooke reads an excerpt from her play that foreshadows her looking for her brother. When I first began reading the play, I felt that it wasn’t going anywhere and the characters were