Julia Louis-Dreyfus will make her Broadway debut alongside Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Joe Keery and Lily Rabe in the first Broadway revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s Tony Award-winning play Other Desert Cities, directed by Tony Award winner John Benjamin Hickey.
Other Desert Cities will play a 16-week limited engagement at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre with previews starting Tuesday, September 29 ahead of a Sunday, October 18 opening night. The limited engagement will end Sunday, January 17, 2027.
The production and casting were announced today by producers.
“I had, more or less, talked myself out of imagining Other Desert Cities back in New York,” said playwright Baitz said in a statement. “But John Hickey is family to me, and I trust him completely. We go back longer than I ever imagined: he hears a play – its ideas, its feeling, its music – with an intelligence and knowingness that anchors a room. And with this company of actors a playwright dreams about, I thought that if there were still something alive in it, they would find it. What’s slightly unnerving is that nearly 20 years later, through all the fractures and divisions, the questions remain the same: how to live with who we are and what we’ve done and call that a life.”
Hickey said, “I have loved Robbie’s plays since he began writing them. I acted in two of them early in my career, and when I recently revisited Other Desert Cities, I was stunned at how relevant the play remains, maybe now more than ever. It’s an incredibly funny, surprising, and heartbreaking play about an American family. OUR American family. To be able to bring it back to Broadway, with this powerhouse ensemble of actors, and incredible creative team, is a dream come true.”
Other Desert Cities premiered Off Broadway in a limited engagement at Lincoln Center Theater in 2011, with the cast including Stockard Channing, Linda Lavin, Stacy Keach, Thomas Sadoski and Elizabeth Marvel. The play transferred to Broadway’s Booth Theatre that year, with Lavin replaced by Judith Light and Rachel Griffiths taking over for Marvel. The play was directed by Joe Mantello.
The official synopsis: “Every family has a secret. Not every family survives it. On Christmas Eve, the sunlit Palm Springs home of a politically connected family becomes a battleground of memory, loyalty, and legacy when a daughter returns with a memoir and the power to expose the explosive truth they’ve kept hidden. As the past comes into focus, the question isn’t just what happened, but who owns a family’s story, and what is the cost to tell it.”
The design team for Other Desert Cities will include three-time Tony Award winner Scott Pask (scenic design), Emmy Award winner Tom Broecker (costume design), eight-time Tony Award winner Natasha Katz (lighting design), two-time Tony Award nominee Mikaal Sulaiman (sound design and original music) and Robert Pickens (hair and wig design).
Other Desert Cities is produced by ATG Productions, Bad Robot Live, Gavin Kalin Productions, Kristin Caskey, Bee Carrozzini and Mike Isaacson.
