The 11-time Emmy winner comes to the stage alongside Allison Janney, Ed Harris, Lily Rabe and Joe Keery in a revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s family drama

NEED TO KNOW

• Julia Louis-Dreyfus makes her Broadway debut in the first Broadway revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities, playing a wealthy Palm Springs matriarch with a complicated past
• Allison Janney, Ed Harris, Lily Rabe and Joe Keery round out the five-person ensemble in the family drama, directed by John Benjamin Hickey
• The production, now playing at New York City’s Hudson Theatre through Jan. 17, 2027, explores family secrets, political divisions and the lasting consequences of grief

Elaine Benes. Selina Meyer. Christine Campbell.

For decades, Julia Louis-Dreyfus has given audiences some of television’s most unforgettable characters, immortalized in episodes of Seinfeld, Veep and The New Adventures of Old Christine that fans can revisit again and again.

Now, in her long-awaited Broadway debut, the 11-time Emmy Award winner has added another memorable character to that list. But unlike her beloved television roles, this one comes with an expiration date.

In the first Broadway revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities — which opened Sunday at the Hudson Theatre in New York City and runs through Jan. 17, 2027 — Louis-Dreyfus delivers one of the richest performances of her career as Polly Wyeth, a wealthy, fiercely opinionated Palm Springs matriarch whose wit and ironclad convictions make her a formidable force in her own family. Brimming with charm, quick with a cutting remark and determined to have the last word, Polly gives Louis-Dreyfus ample opportunity to flex the comic precision that has made her a television icon, while demonstrating a natural command of the stage with the ease of a seasoned theater veteran.

She’s hardly alone. Under John Benjamin Hickey’s deft direction, a stellar five-person ensemble made up of Louis-Dreyfus, Allison Janney, Ed Harris, Lily Rabe and Joe Keery brings humor, humanity and devastating emotional depth to a crackling revival that feels strikingly relevant in 2026.

Set in Palm Springs during Christmas 2004, the play centers on the wealthy, politically connected Wyeths. Polly and her husband, Lyman (Harris), are enjoying their comfortable retirement when their daughter Brooke (Rabe), a writer with a history of mental health issues, returns home carrying a manuscript that threatens to upend their carefully constructed world.

Brooke has written a memoir about a devastating tragedy involving her older brother, whose involvement with a radical political group ended in violence and his apparent suicide decades earlier. Hellbent on publishing her account, she finds herself at odds with her parents, who are desperately trying to keep the past buried.

Also caught in the crossfire are Brooke’s younger brother Trip (Keery), a television producer who has learned to navigate the household’s dysfunction with humor, and Polly’s sister Silda (Janney), a recovering alcoholic whose liberal politics and willingness to challenge her sister make her a particularly combustible houseguest.

What follows is a battle over memory, truth and the complicated obligations that bind families together, even when they threaten to tear them apart.

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At the center of it all is Louis-Dreyfus, whose Polly is as entertaining as she is difficult to love.

As she’s demonstrated in films like Enough Said, You Hurt My Feelings and Tuesday, Louis-Dreyfus has long been capable of much more than comedy. Here, she puts those dramatic instincts to good use, allowing glimpses of Polly’s vulnerability to emerge even as the character fights to keep her emotions in check.

She can squeeze a laugh from seemingly any line, but it’s in the play’s second act, when long-buried truths finally come to light, that her performance becomes truly extraordinary. As Polly’s carefully maintained composure begins to fracture, Louis-Dreyfus allows us to see the grief and fear she’s spent years suppressing beneath a polished mask of privilege and perfection.

By the end, even Polly’s earlier ferocity takes on a different meaning.

Janney is equally terrific as Silda, Polly’s outspoken, quick-witted sister and frequent sparring partner. The two actresses have deliciously combative chemistry, trading barbs with the ease of siblings who have spent a lifetime learning exactly how to wound one another.

But Janney —an Oscar and Emmy winner herself — also brings a bruised, weary quality to Silda, whose struggles with addiction have left her dependent on the very sister she so often antagonizes. Her performance finds both humor and heartbreak in a woman who has never quite escaped her own demons.

Harris, meanwhile, brings an almost Robert Redford-like warmth to Lyman, a former Hollywood actor and U.S. ambassador whose relaxed California charm initially makes him seem like the most reasonable person in the room. His affectionate relationship with Brooke feels especially tender, which allows the flashes of anger that emerge as their conflict escalates all the more startling.

Rabe has perhaps the most difficult assignment as Brooke, whose anguish drives much of the action. She captures the character’s emotional volatility with conviction, even when Brooke’s relentless insistence that her pain take precedence over everyone else’s makes her frustratingly difficult to like. It’s a demanding, often abrasive performance, but one that underscores how thoroughly grief can consume a person. And in the end, it’s Rabe’s energy that winds up being this production’s beating heart.

Keery, also making his Broadway debut, provides a welcome counterbalance as Trip. Cool, funny and comparatively well-adjusted, he’s the reluctant referee, using humor and a healthy dose of emotional distance to survive the increasingly explosive reunion. His easygoing presence offers some relief from the heavier confrontations.

Hickey, an accomplished actor himself, proves to be an actor’s director, favoring an understated approach that allows the performances to take center stage. Nothing feels forced or overly orchestrated, and the relationships have the lived-in familiarity of people who know one another’s strengths, weaknesses and deepest vulnerabilities.

Other Desert Cities first premiered Off-Broadway in January 2011 before transferring to Broadway later that year, with a cast that included Stockard Channing, Stacy Keach, Judith Light, Rachel Griffiths and Thomas Sadoski. The production earned five Tony Award nominations, winning one for Light, and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Fifteen years later, the play’s political tensions feel even more pronounced. Set against the backdrop of post-9/11 America and the Iraq War, the ideological clashes between the conservative Wyeth parents and their liberal children now seem almost prophetic, foreshadowing the increasingly bitter divisions that would come to define the country.

Ultimately, though, Baitz’s play is less concerned with who is politically right than with the damage families inflict on one another in the name of love, loyalty and protection. And thanks to the ensemble led by Louis-Dreyfus, this revival makes those wounds feel painfully real.

Tickets to Other Desert Cities are now on sale.

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