Julia Louis-Dreyfus has reached a point in her career where she doesn’t have to do anything for the first time anymore. But on a bright summer afternoon, over a late lunch of pea soup and sashimi, she’s talking about not one but two new experiences: getting ready for her Broadway debut and going to the Tony Awards.
The Tonys were a couple of nights ago. “I don’t mean to sound corny,” Louis-Dreyfus says, clearly moved. “But there’s something earnest about the theater community that’s beautiful. Everyone knows what the job is. And it’s a big job.”
Right now, Louis-Dreyfus’s job is becoming Polly Wyeth, the matriarch of a wealthy Palm Springs family, in the revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s 2011 play Other Desert Cities. Directed by John Benjamin Hickey, it opens at the Hudson Theater in October. At our lunch, wearing a breezy blue-and-white-striped top and white pants, Louis-Dreyfus has the warmth, charm, and ease that will serve her well as Polly—even if Polly uses those qualities like a scalpel.
Louis-Dreyfus had been looking for the right stage project for years when Other Desert Cities came across her desk. It’s a highly literate play—Baitz’s writing is smart, witty, and sharp, in the tradition of Edward Albee—and Louis-Dreyfus was hooked. It didn’t hurt that Polly is one of modern theater’s most formidable characters: a country-club conservative with polished manners and impenetrable charm.
Here’s a quick summary: It’s Christmas Eve 2004, and Polly and Lyman Wyeth’s daughter, Brooke, a writer, has come home to Palm Springs after six years away. She joins her sarcastic younger brother, Trip, a TV producer, and Polly’s sister, Silda, a proud leftist who’s trying to stay sober. After recovering from years of depression—treatment arranged and paid for by her parents—Brooke is carrying a bombshell: the manuscript of her upcoming memoir (published by Knopf, excerpted in The New Yorker). It’s about her brother Henry, who, according to the family story, died in the ’70s by suicide after joining a radical anti-war group. The memoir is Brooke’s way of confronting that tragedy (Henry was involved in a bombing that killed a man). But parts of the official story still don’t add up; she doesn’t have all the answers—and isn’t even sure what the questions are.
Polly is the keeper of the family story, and she and Lyman see Brooke’s memoir as a huge betrayal, threatening the careful balance they’ve built. But in the end, the play isn’t quite what it seems, and Baitz saves his most devastating move for the finale—a twist that changes everything that came before.
It’s all wonderfully, wickedly funny. Louis-Dreyfus—beloved for her iconic roles as Elaine Benes and Selina Meyer—will be taking on a more dangerous kind of comedy here: intimidating, elegant, poisonous, and completely emotionally guarded. Polly’s humor sits on top of tragedy.
The role struck a chord with Louis-Dreyfus, who grew up in New York and Washington, DC—places full of grand dames like Polly Wyeth. “This is a woman who gets her hair done a couple times a week. And her nails, the whole thing.” She smiles. “I know these women.”
She’s the mother of two grown sons with her husband, Brad Hall, and she’s been thinking about what it means to guide a child through a crisis. Her own parents—her American mother, Judith (known to listeners of Louis-Dreyfus’s podcast, Wiser Than Me), and her French father, Gérard—divorced when she was young. Louis-Dreyfus understands, from both sides, how family shapes us, and she knows the stakes in the play couldn’t be higher. Brooke’s memoir “is like a murder,” she tells me. “Polly sees it as killing what they have.”
TO EACH HIS OWN
Other Desert Cities, written in 2011 and set two deDecades ago, a tell-all memoir tears a family apart. She wears a La Ligne sweater with Isabel Marant trousers and Khaite shoes.
Fifteen years after its debut at Lincoln Center, Other Desert Cities feels even more urgent today. Set in 2004 America, the country is still shaken by the September 11 attacks and just a year into the Iraq War. References to anthrax, Donald Rumsfeld, and al-Qaida are scattered throughout like shrapnel. The political divisions that would later split the nation hadn’t fully formed yet; the Wyeths’ mainstream conservatism would soon have little place in the culture. This was also the time before smartphones and social media—the last moment when the code of silence Polly relies on could still hold up.
“All the extraordinary seeds of that national tragedy are in this play,” says Hickey. “But in an incredibly funny, family-focused way.”
When putting together the cast, Hickey needed actors who could bring the world of over two decades ago into the present. The result? “The Knicks lineup,” he says. Joining Louis-Dreyfus are Ed Harris as Lyman, Allison Janney as Silda, Lily Rabe as Brooke, and Joe Keery (from Stranger Things, also a popular musician performing under the stage name Djo) as Trip.
“They understand that this play is a team effort,” Hickey says. That’s also something Louis-Dreyfus noticed: the play is an ensemble of vividly written characters, each deeply flawed and desperately human.
By the time Louis-Dreyfus and I meet, the cast has had two read-throughs—one before she took the part. What Hickey heard from her—warmth mixed with toughness, sharp humor combined with deep sadness—told him everything he needed to know. He said, “Julia, my only note is: Say yes. Say yes. Jump into this.”
Ed Harris speaks to me from Fort Worth, where he’s on a break from filming the Paramount+ show Dutton Ranch. It’s been over six years since he last appeared on Broadway as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, and he’s ready to come back. “I need it for my sanity,” he says dryly.
What he loves about theater is its simplicity. “You come to the theater, you prepare, you do the show, and you go home. You’re not sitting around for 12 hours to be in front of the camera for two minutes.” Harris will bring an old-school, reserved masculinity to Lyman, whose wounds run deeper than they appear. “I think it’s perhaps more difficult for him in a way than it is for Polly,” he says. “I think it really affected him very deeply.”
Meanwhile, Allison Janney’s character, Silda, is a mess with a sharp comeback. When we speak, Janney is in Italy, filming the Netflix series The Diplomat. (“I had to buy another suitcase because I went a little crazy with the shopping here,” she says.) Janney has been close friends with Hickey, who is also an actor, for 30 years—they last appeared onstage together in Six Degrees of Separation, playing husband and wife—and has long known Baitz, who wrote for The West Wing, on which she appeared for seven seasons.
Silda, with her outspokenness and history of addiction, operates differently than Polly—her intelligence is less controlling, more observational. Silda joins a long line of memorable Janney characters who use wit as a way of examining things. “I take on these strong, powerful women and just have fun with them. This is heaven to me.”
The play asks whether family members can ever move past old roles. Hickey mentions that he recently saw Joe Mantello’s stunning new production of Death of a Salesman and recognized the shared DNA. “All the great family plays are the same,” he says. “They’re all A Long Day’s Journey Into Night. They ask, Who is my dad? Who is my mom? And the answer: I’ll never really know.”
Louis-Dreyfus puts this idea even more personally. “Siblings have their own very isolated experience: ‘You have different parents than I have.'””That’s true in my family—and I say this as someone with a lot of sisters. My husband’s family has many siblings too. Our two kids have their own experience of us as parents.”
Before our lunch, she visited the Hudson Theater for the first time, standing on the stage and taking it all in. “It’s a great theater because it’s intimate,” she says. “People aren’t super far away. It feels personal.”
That intimacy is intentional. The Wyeth family’s midcentury-modern Palm Springs house is a character in itself. Scott Pask, the show’s designer and a big fan of that era, is treating the set like a boxing ring. That fits a family whose main way of communicating is verbal sparring—they throw their punches, then step back.
Janney likes the boxing ring idea too: “We all take our turns. ‘Ding, ding, ding—I’m down for the count on that one.'”
Until Other Desert Cities opens this fall, the cast and the Wyeths will be figuring each other out, learning how to spar, and rehearsing their entrances and exits. In a play about memory, truth, storytelling, and what we decide to hold onto, Janney’s approach is simply human. “I cherish them,” she says of her fellow actors. “And I swear to God—to my mother—this time I’ll journal every day, because I want to remember it.”
In this story: hair by Matthew Monzon; makeup by Romy Soleimani; manicure by Sonya Meesh; tailoring by Jacqui Bennett at Carol Ai Studio Tailors. Produced by AL Studio. Set design by Laïla Ibrahim.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of frequently asked questions about Julia LouisDreyfuss Broadway debut covering everything from the basics to insider tips
General Questions
Q Who is Julia LouisDreyfus
A She is a famous and highly awarded American actress and comedian best known for her roles in the TV shows Seinfeld and Veep
Q Is this really her first time on Broadway
A Yes this is her official Broadway debut While she has had a legendary career in television and film she has never performed in a play on Broadway until now
Q What play is she in
A She is starring in a new play called The Roommate a twoperson comedy written by Jen Silverman
Q Who is her costar
A She is starring alongside the acclaimed actress Mia Farrow
Q What is The Roommate about
A Its a comedic drama about two middleaged women who become roommates in Iowa One is a quiet recently divorced woman and the other is a freespirited woman from New York with a mysterious past Their friendship takes some very unexpected turns
About the Play and Performance
Q Why is this a big deal for the theater world
A Its a major event because a TV icon of her caliber is stepping onto the live stage for the first time It brings a lot of attention and new audiences to Broadway and people are eager to see how her comedic talents translate to live theater
Q Is it a musical
A No its a straight play However it is a comedy so it will have plenty of humor
Q How long is the show
A The running time is about 90 minutes and it is performed without an intermission
Q What are the reviews saying about her performance
A Generally reviews have been positive praising her comedic timing and her ability to hold her own on stage Critics have noted that she brings a different more grounded energy to the role than her famous TV characters
Q Im a huge Veep and Seinfeld fan Will I like this