For theater instructor Aaron Wood, Other Desert Cities was just the right play to choose when North Central Texas College needed to revise its schedule.
Because of renovations to the chief performing arts space on the college’s Gainesville campus, the department had to pivot and produce the midwinter show in the Black Box Theater at NCTC’s downtown Denton Campus.
In addition to being an intimate ensemble show, Wood said the Jon Robin Baitz drama makes the most of the students in NCTC acting classes. It also rhymes with the complicated familial and political American landscape of the moment.
The drama, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2012, is also part of Wood’s entry into NCTC theater department leadership. He steps into the position that Thom Talbott held for years. Talbott is semiretired and is still doing some instructing for the NCTC department.
Wood joins Missy Embrey, an NCTC theater instructor whose expertise is in stagecraft and technical direction. Wood said the college’s program is collaborative, rather than a hierarchy. That means he and Embrey are peers in leading the community college’s department.
Wood earned his doctorate in theater at Louisiana State University, where he studied history, theory, criticism and dramatic literature. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Northwestern State University in Louisiana and then got his master’s degree at Texas Tech University.
Wood said he pursued some tenure-track posts but then saw NCTC was looking for a drama instructor. He liked that the position lets the instructor “be everything,” from a director to an acting teacher.
He said he also liked the community college model and how it opens the door for anyone to study theater at the college. For Other Desert Cities, Wood said he appreciates the black box, a smaller, experimental space, in Denton’s downtown.
“We are a community college,” Wood said. “Community is such an essential part of our identity, and that doesn’t just mean that we sort of create this inner circle of ‘the theater people.’ I want everybody to be a theater person. That’s part of our [general education] curriculum. We teach a theater appreciation class. We teach a film appreciation class, and I think the name of classes matter.”
Wood said part of the department’s mission is to create the next generation of the theater and arts audience.
“We have, as an art form, an audience base that is dwindling,” Wood said. “The sort of target demographic of theatergoers right now is ... white women above the age of 60. That audience isn’t being recruited and replaced as they age out of the theatergoing experience. And I think college classes like this are a great opportunity to show students how exciting and impactful and engaging just being an audience member can be.”
Wood said a show like Other Desert Cities serves both his acting students and an intergenerational audience.
Other Desert Cities unfolds on Christmas Eve 2004 and finds the Wyeth family on the edge of upending. Family patriarch Lyman is fumbling with his own identity, a Reagan Republican and former Hollywood actor. Polly, his wife, is equally confused about shifting cultural norms. She was a successful co-writer of an MGM comedy series with her sister, Silda, in the 1960s. But the sisters are at odds as Polly works overtime to hide her Jewish roots with all the trappings of WASP success.
The Wyeths have three children. Trip is a Los Angeles reality television producer and not completely proud of it. Brooke is back at her parents’ Palm Springs house for the first time in six years, with a severe depressive episode and a failed marriage still fresh.
The third Wyeth child is Henry, whose suicide plunged the Wyeths into a leaden grief. Henry hangs around the Wyeth home like a hungry ghost, making his quiet demands and keeping his family tethered to a complicated past. And when Henry isn’t lurking in the play’s psychological shadows, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks come into the light and shows the deepening political divide between the two generations of Wyeths. Aunt Silda also objects to her sister’s sunny Reaganite philosophy, but it’s her recent alcoholic relapse that has Polly on pins and needles.
To top it all off, Brooke has written a new book. It’s a glaring look at her family and how Henry’s death exposed the Wyeths’ imperfections.
Wood said the drama is challenging, with a story that confronts family secrets and lies.
“It’s also a show that deals very directly and very blatantly with politics,” he said. “It’s set in the wake of 9/11. It’s set in the sort of war on terrorism, and there was a huge burst of nationalism. We all remember — everybody was Lee Greenwood. We were all proud to be Americans. And then over the next three to four years, that divide started to magnify.
“I think we’re in the same spot right now, where the nuance of political rhetoric is starting to get so binary and so black and white that people don’t know how to sort of meet differing ideas at a common ground.”
For the cast members, the drama is both an opportunity and a challenge.
“I really needed a show like this under my belt,” said Amera Mota, an NCTC alumna and University of North Texas student who plays the role of Brooke. “Really, it touches on a lot of really sensitive subjects, but it also brings to light a lot of the things that aren’t necessarily said in public and that are kind of kept in the dark.”
Owen Wildoner, a freshman NCTC drama major who plays the role of Trip, said he read part of the script in acting class. Wood had removed character names, but as he read it, Wildoner said he liked that Baitz’s script doesn’t flinch in the face of deep family trauma.
“I think he really touches on a lot of sensitive topics, like suicide and mental illness, really beautifully and very sensitive, and even in a way that’s approachable for people that wouldn’t normally think about that kind of stuff, or even consider it,” he said. “It’s a script that I really wanted to do. It’s my kind of play. ... I love to read, you know, just kind of a contemporary piece that’s witty, with very, very whip-sharp dialogue, and just the secrets and all that good stuff.”
Other Desert Cities does a bang-up job at depicting family conflict and how the players in household strife consider themselves truth-tellers.
“I think Trip is most interested in avoiding hypocrisy,” said Cameron Stewart, an NCTC drama major who plays Lyman Wyeth, the reliable and rock-solid patriarch. “Brooke is most interested in the truth, like the real truth. And Polly and Lyman are most interested in the family truth. ... And that’s the whole conflict of the play, because the truth will kind of destroy the family.”
Wood said Polly and Lyman represent two poles of familial truth.
“One thing is to convince themselves that the family truth is true, and one is the person who has never been able to sell themselves on that deception, and that makes it really interesting,” Wood said.
Anna Lawson, an NCTC education major who plays the role of Polly Wyeth, said the matriarch of the Wyeth clan is both under the spell of Nancy Reagan but still attached to both her Jewish heritage and the writing career she surrendered so that she could apply all her talent for finding the truth to preserving the Wyeths’ grand artifice. Over time, she’s become brittle, fearful and aggrieved. Polly might be practicing some revision when she considers her successful career.
“She couldn’t evolve,” Lawson said. “It came down to everything that was being written was more of what people wanted to watch, and like she says, ‘the drugs and the lefties whining.’ It’s very heavily her choosing to stop, because she’s refusing to evolve and continue, unlike her sister, who was all for it and wanting to go as far as she possibly could.”