Stunning, funny Ross Valley Players' drama skewers hypocrites

It felt like a heavyweight champ had whacked me in the solar plexus.

Without gloves.

As intended by playwright Jon Robin Baitz, the startling, climactic secret revealed in “Other Desert Cities” inverted my view of two main characters — plus another who never appears onstage.

But there’s more than one secret in motion at any given time in this complex Ross Valley Players’ production.

Raw nerves, raw feelings and hypocrites are exposed.

Christmas Eve, 2004.

Brooke (portrayed nimbly, from heaving anger to poignant stunned silence, by Jennifer Gregory) comes home shortly before publication of her tell-all memoir that skewers her parents.

Those elders (Polly, depicted in chameleon-like, regal and repugnant glory by Ellen Brooks, and Lyman, ex-movie star and ex-ambassador underplayed expertly by Dick Martin) are ex-members of the Reagan inner circle who live in yesteryear, hiding out in their staid Palm Springs home in the desert.

Also in attendance during an uncomfortable reunion are Polly’s liberal sister, Silda Grauman (with Kristine Ann Lowry excelling at being manic, bitchy and loving as a woman just out of alcohol rehab who harbors a giant secret of her own), and Brooke’s other brother, Trip (Peter Warden being exquisitely inelegant as the producer of a lowbrow Maury Povich-like reality TV show).

All five are believable.

Never theatrical cardboard figures, always fleshed out beings that could be part of your own family.

Or down-the-street neighbors.

Up close and personal, director Phoebe Moyer is an intelligent, articulate, warm human being. And she’s managed to apply all those traits to her stage-work, ensuring that the five-member cast forcefully drives the 140-minute drama while balancing laugh-aloud comedy with family torment.

Her playbill notes indicate she wanted to showcase Baitz’s desire to “find the humor and the humanity within the conflict and pain.”

She succeeded.

Despite having to rein in the prodigal daughter character who, post-hospitalization, is still fighting depression over a broken marriage and internal anguish about Henry, her suicidal anti-war brother/best friend.

Moyer’s proficient direction let me buy Brooke drawing a line in the desert sand and daring the others to cross it.

And it let Brooke, who consistently refers to her estranged parents by their first names rather than mom or dad, ignore the fact that she’s triggering a thermonuclear time bomb by airing family secrets that could blow the holiday off the Wyeth calendar and destroy her nuclear family.

The playwright, meanwhile, allows Polly to counter-attack Brooke, accusing her of having “lots of secrets in her dollhouse.”

He also sneaks in thematic tip-offs with lines such as, “Most people go through their lives pretending.”

Baitz, creator of television’s “Brothers & Sisters,” also introduces the idea that acting and reality “are hardly mutually exclusive in this family.”

Considering all the purposeful camouflage in “Other Desert Cities,” I presumed the title had multiple interpretations, not the least of which was a reference to locales and manifold deaths and the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But it concretely refers to a sign on eastbound Interstate 10 that indicates the freeway is heading toward “other Desert Cities” — the rest of the Coachella Valley.

In the play, which debuted off-Broadway and then became a Pulitzer Prize-nominated show on the Great White Way in 2011, the environment almost becomes a character. The appropriately genteel set by Ronald Krempetz, in fact, is lighted as brightly as any I’ve ever seen — a not-so-subtle hint of the desert sun?

And everything’s precisely in place, including lined up photos of Barry Goldwater, Frank Sinatra and, of course, the Wyeth buddies, Nancy and Ronnie Reagan.

Only the costumes by Michael A. Berg expose the differences in the people we’re looking at: the elders don fashionable dress-up garb, their adult kids sport insouciant dress-downs.

Although some skeptics might find the play’s O’Henry-like denouement inconsistent with its build-up, I see it as totally in keeping with what’s gone before.

As for that blow to my solar plexus, I forgot to mention “Other Desert Cities” also left indelible marks on my heart and brain.

“Other Desert Cities” will run at The Barn, Marin Art & Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Ross, through June 15. Night performances, Thursdays at 7:30, Fridays and Saturdays at 8; matinees, Sundays at 2. Tickets: $13-$26. Informtion: www.rossvalleyplayers.com or (415) 456-9555.