Jon Robin Baitz gets the last word with ‘Other Desert Cities’

Hollywood spits out writers all the time. But it’s not often that a writer gets the chance to spit back — and on the world’s biggest stage, no less.

Yet Jon Robin Baitz has precisely that opportunity in his lyrical new Broadway play “Other Desert Cities,” which he hopes can achieve an improbable goal: fulfill the unmet ambition of an ABC series he conceived but was basically fired from four years ago.

“On ‘Brothers & Sisters,’ I tried to write a show about an emerging matriarch and what America was like right now,” he says of the politically minded family drama that ran for five seasons, the last four without its creator. “I didn’t get to explore that on television. But I ended up being able to tell that story on Broadway.”

It’s a few hours after the curtain has dropped on a preview performance of “Cities,” just days before the show’s Thursday opening at the Booth Theatre. (It will arrive in Los Angeles late next year at the Mark Taper Forum.) Dressed in a casual button-down shirt and wearing owlish Harry Potter glasses, Baitz is dining at a popular midtown Manhattan theater hangout with the actress Rachel Griffiths, the “Brothers & Sisters” star who also anchors this incarnation of “Cities.” A Drama Desk-nominated and Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted playwright of works such as “The Substance of Fire” and “A Fair Country,” Baitz has, surprisingly, never had a show on Broadway, and the experience, after the debacle of “Sisters,” appears to have brought him a mix of anxiety and vindication.

He would be justified in both feelings. In 2007, after a stand-off with ABC executives over the creative direction of the series — he wanted a darker and more dramatic tone while the brass craved something shiny and lighter — Baitz was removed from the day-to-day running of the show. He got angry, then depressed. He left Hollywood for the New York theater world in a blaze of resentment, some of which he aired in blog items on the Huffington Post.

But all that frustration, he says, came with a silver lining: It provided fodder for a stage drama. “I felt stifled almost a priori on ‘Brothers and Sisters,’” he said. “The show gave me all the reasons to unconsciously think about subjects like the power of women and their emotional lives but not the means to explore them.”

Baitz doesn’t encounter any such problem in “Cities,” which leaves no psychological stone unturned in telling of a Waspish Palm Springs family during a Christmas homecoming. Transferred from Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater and directed by Joe Mantello, Baitz’s former life partner and his frequent theater collaborator, “Cities” offers a full-color portrait of guilt, blame and, occasionally, redemption.

In “Cities,” the 40-ish writer Brooke (Griffiths) has come west for the holidays to find her hyper-educated family locked in its usual dynamic — argument. Domineering mother Polly (Stockard Channing) rides Brooke about her bohemian New York lifestyle and her liberal views. (The play is set in 2004, and family politics often intersects with the global kind, particularly the policies of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney). Father Lyman (Stacy Keach), a retired film actor and Republican-socialite — he and his wife run in blue-chip conservative circles with the likes of “Ronnie and Nancy” — chides but protects his daughter.

Slacker younger brother Trip (Thomas Sadoski), meanwhile, has fallen backward into success as the producer of a trashy TV trial show, implicitly underscoring the failures of his depressive sister. And Polly has her own complicated relationship with sister Silda (Judith Light), a recovering alcoholic who deadpans barbed truths.

As the events unfold over the holiday, revelations spill out like marbles, particularly over Brooke’s soon-to-be-published memoir about older brother Henry’s suicide. Three actors — Channing, Keach and Sadoski — made the move from Lincoln Center to Broadway. Linda Lavin’s Silda is picked up here by Light, while Elizabeth Marvel’s Brooke role is taken over by Griffiths. The Australian-born, Los Angeles-dwelling actress has made a living playing the complicated daughter of dysfunctional mothers, first as the emotionally slippery Brenda Chenowith on HBO’s “Six Feet Under,” then as liberal eldest sister Sarah Walker on “Sisters.”

Though Griffiths stayed on the ABC show through its final season, she believes this part also offers her a kind of second chance. “I’d forgotten how to act, really,” she said of her work on the series. “I was doing a copy of a copy of a copy of a feeling.”

It took a trip to see “Other Desert Cities” at Lincoln Center to invigorate her. “It was like a stem-cell injection that took me back to why I decided to get into acting,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it when Robbie [Baitz] asked me to be in it and have us work together again.” In a phone interview, Sadoski described the pair as communicating in “an almost antipodal shorthand.”

If it was a harmonious reunion behind the scenes, there aren’t many rainbows or sprinkles on the stage. Baitz infuses Brooke with much of his own passion and anger. “I don’t want to write about ephemera,” Brooke says to her parents, in a burst of articulate indignation that one could easily imagine coming from Baitz during the post- “Sisters” period.

That period, the writer says, was a dark one. After lashing out at executives — “I had a phenomenal propensity toward terrorist behavior” — Baitz holed up in his Sag Harbor, N.Y., cabin. “I was in pain, and volatile, and unfit for human company,” he remembers, a volatility he says was fueled by the Hollywood writers strike.

Baitz talked to almost no one during that time; he recalls with some bitterness that, among the “Sisters” cast, only Griffiths, Rob Lowe, and Baitz’s longtime friend Ron Rifkin even checked in on him. He began seeing a therapist four or five times a week. “I got some help, and I got more help, and I got even more help,” he says.

Just a few days from his 50th birthday, though, Baitz says he has mellowed. “I realize a lot of what I was angry at was my own rage,” he said. “I was angry that, in my own passion for telling the truth, I was overtly confrontational.”

Reconciliation is hardly the only theme of “Cities.” Like “Substance of Fire,” this play also touches on the subject of Jewish reinvention. (Polly is a Texas member of the tribe who has assimilated.) Politics and the culture wars are an area of fascination, particularly in Polly and Lyman’s belief that drugs and loud music have ruined the next generation. And geography plays a huge part in “Cities,” whose title comes from a sign on Interstate 10. (Although he says he has no desire to return to Los Angeles, where he spent much of his youth, Baitz says he “came back to knowing the West in writing this play.”)

But ultimately, it’s the tension between truth and diplomacy that lies at the heart of the show. Baitz is too subtle a writer to offer either endorsement or condemnation of whether Brooke should publish the manuscript that will ravage her parents. But he shows an awareness of consequences that the character — and, perhaps, his younger self — lacked, when he has Silda admonish Brooke that “the truth is expensive.”

“The truth is costly, but I’m glad Robbie decided to pay that price,” Sadoski said. “It brought him back to a community where, frankly, there was a void.”

Baitz said that, although he has regrets about how he confronted television executives, he feels a sense of validation about how it turned out. “In retrospect being booted and not getting rich from the show is the best thing that could have happened to me,” he said. “It meant I had to soothe my sorrows with writing instead of money.”

steve.zeitchik@latimes.com