Photograph by Karli Cadel

The cast of Other Desert Cities. Back Row: Alan Rust, Melanie Lora, Rosina Reynolds, Front Row: Geoffrey Ulysses Geissinger, Debra Wanger

For a couple of decades now, I’ve worked in the memoir trade — writing about the form, teaching and facilitating the craft to hundreds, and yes, actually writing one of my own. My students were everyday folks — in most cases, still enmeshed in the universal trial of families and their unfinished business. And it was the “family tragedy” so many wished to tell — Mom’s betrayal, Dad’s cancer, a sister’s suicide, each subject worthy of a near-and-dear’s take. But worthiness does not displace the ethics of authorship. The most concerned query I got: “How do I avoid upsetting my loved ones with [fill in the blank revelation of awfulness], which I believe damaged me and my family?”

When I wrote my own memoir, I too stumbled on this question and the anxieties it raised. I wrote of the living and the dead, and a few living readers ended up wishing they (or I) were in the latter camp. Well, no, that’s extreme — better to say they wished they’d been consulted. That was the lesson, and it formed the core of my advice: try not to make your story an act of revenge, uglier than it need be, even if some justification may exist. (As such, Mommie Dearest is a masterpiece of retribution.) Instead, try, if possible, to make the memoir an act of community, of compromise, layered with some humility. Invite redemption. Don’t merely gavel out a literary life sentence without the possibility of parole.

It’s a delicate business, in which small slips can lead to disastrous consequences — in other words, excellent dramatic material. In 2010, I read about a play in which a memoirist takes on her family’s worst decision, only to find her version of events facing a wall of resistance from Mom and Dad. Exactly why this is, the writer has been kept from knowing. The play was Jon Robin Baitz’s award-winning Other Desert Cities; a frighteningly explosive production of this tale, as full of deceit as it is of redemption, has recently arrived at San Diego’s Cygnet Theater, directed by Sean Murray.

The Wyeths are a Los Angeles-centric family: showbiz parents now retired to Palm Springs, two talented kids doing well in TV and with writing. It’s Christmas Eve, 2002, and daughter Brooke, a freelance journalist who has had an extended hospital stay after a nervous breakdown, arrives in the desert with her memoir, its first installment due out shortly in The New Yorker. Part remembrance, part comeuppance, Brooke’s book focuses on her mother, Polly — once a screenwriter with a razor-sharp tongue (“I like to spar”) — and her father, Lyman — a former B-movie actor who played gunslingers and gumshoes at Paramount — and the untold story of their son’s Henry’s death. In the early 1970s, Henry killed himself after he and three others bombed a recruitment station during protests against the Vietnam War. A “homeless veteran,” accidentally on site, was “burnt to death.”

Younger son Trip’s TV show Jury of Your Peers features litigants — and on occasion, midgets — who sign waivers to endure scripted courtroom humiliation. A fifth wheel, Silda, sober again, is Polly’s dependent sister, with whom Polly wrote the “crazy-ass Hilary movies,” sitcoms about a wacky L.A. gal who surfs with nuns. Silda conspires with Brooke as an early reader and advocates for the book’s “right to exist” as an aid in her recovery. Brooke’s tale, bravely and naively, drags into the light the dark beast of parental concealment.

Henry’s death — his drowned body was never found — has guided Brooke’s tell-all. It has also, as, we slowly surmise, brought on the family’s baleful dysfunction. The Wyeths are a performance-based clan who turn stylish repartee into wicked assault. Throughout, however, we wonder: is Brooke’s retaliation the problem? Or is it Henry’s death? Or the family’s destructive unconsciousness, in which their lost child’s memory is buried?

Apologies to those who believe that just because a book, film, or TV series is said to be “based on a true story,” there is some known and universally accepted version of the story already out there. Whatever is presented will often differ radically from what might be found in a book, a TED talk, or an art installation. (As a rule, I avoid biopics — Oppenheimer, Bernstein, Dylan. Biographies halo fact; they are multi-dimensional. Nothing of worldly consequence revolves around a single protagonist, though I realize elevating a male myth is sales heaven.)

My advice to writers hobbled with worry that their words will destabilize an oft-told family tale: if it’s likely to do damage, don’t write it. Turn to fiction. Find a different subject, say something you love, which hurts no one. Memoir does not have to be about a bad thing. It can be about a good thing. Such an option often is a revelation to taletellers.

* * *

It’s Christmas in Palm Springs. The Cygnet stage features sleek low couches, a uniformly bobbled fake tree, and a bar with recessed lighting and decanters of whiskey. Orange desert light glows through the tall windows. After a round of mixed doubles, the Wyeths, morning cocktails in hand, begin bantering. At first, it’s all jolly one-upmanship, from which Lyman refrains; he’s thrilled Brooke has come home and calms the ripples when Brooke and Polly scuffle. But neither parent knows about the memoir waiting in the wings; they’re busy hoping their fitful daughter will relocate from New York to a house for sale next door. Fat chance.

Brooke, a “whiny lefty” who is “locked in her dollhouse,” according to Polly, reminds Mom and Dad that she still finds their Republican loyalties—once best buds with Ron and Nancy Reagan—boorish, their ties to GWB’s hunt for “weapons of mass destruction” despicable. Lyman, channeling his America First spirit, states: “Colin Powell. Most trusted man in America.” It’s an unsettled time, three-years-post-9/11, the country bent on — and rapt by — revenge. Trip hates political talk during holidays; it stirs his media anxiety. “We could all get anthraxed any minute,” he says with akk seriousness. Brooke counters that she never watches TV. To which Trip responds, “That’s unbelievably pretentious.”

After more lippy womano a womano between mother and daughter — the memoir won’t be read and adjudicated until Act Two — Polly lands a few choice digs against Brooke. “Sarcasm is the purview of teenagers and homosexuals.” She blames her daughter for divorcing her husband, a Brit who married for a green card; he left, maybe, because of Brooke’s “trace of lesbianism.” Such toxic accusations are the norm in this clan; only caring statements stand out, and only Lyman indulges in them.

In a private moment, Brooke tells Trip she’s terrified of her parents’ opinion of the book. Has she got it all wrong? Even though her mother nursed her for months in New York — Brooke shows little gratitude — she’s nonetheless adamant that her parents see how consequential her memoir is to her. All she wants is “their blessing.” But is such Christmas-Eve shock and awe the proper means?

Silda enters, cataloging Palm-Springs fakery, her sister’s sass, and how much she misses the juice. Soon she’s the butt of jokes about her recent “slipping,” requiring another rehab. Firing back, she says Brooke can’t recover in these environs: “Palm Spring isn’t a refuge; it’s King Tut’s tomb. The whole town is filled with mummies with tans.” On the money, yet by now the teasing is an obvious coping mechanism for this group’s disorder.

At last, Brooke states her purpose: she’s brought the “gift” of a memoir. What’s it about, Lyman asks? “Us. The story of everything that happened to us.” Super-astute Polly reads the room: The book “is about your brother, of course.” The matriarch knows — a disillusioned daughter has to sling blame and exact revenge on her parents for abandoning their son in his hour of need. What other story can an ungrateful child tell?

Lyman sides with Brooke, then waffles, then feels the doom the memoir has brought. He pleads with Brooke to halt publication. Trip downplays their fury over a “goddam book,” then is frightened by its shadowy presence. Silda again supports Brooke. And Polly,? Well, Polly can only itemize her coming torture: friendships lost, a GOP whisper campaign, a daughter profiting off her pain, estrangement dead ahead. There are consequences, she quietly warns. Publishing means “you would lose us.” Forget about your feelings. Who speaks for ours? Our dignity, our privacy, our loyalties. She levels the worst: “How could I trust you?” Closing Act One, Lyman agrees. “Brooke, you can do what you like after we’re gone!” But to publish now is simply not “good manners.”

* * *

In key moments, Sean Murray’s direction emphasizes the love that lingers shakily among members of this self-torturing family. That’s first. Second, he has to keep the verbal jousts leaping about, from ugly to cruel per Baitz’s pacing. I was glad to see hugs and embraces, glad to feel intimate regard among the charactersdespite their simmering resentments. I thought the play’s quarrelsome nature could have used a bit more air, pauses or beats between the verbal volleys.

Alan Rust as Lyman does the most simmering; he captures the father’s conflict: at one point, under wraps, and later, stridently aggrieved. The Cygnet resident artist, Rosina Reynolds, as Polly, in casual dress whites or Peter Max robe, is brilliantly rigid, a Marine matron who never breaks,. Sheadores her GOP fundraisers. She is a true believer. Debra Wanger as Silda is a comic foil, underutilized, I fear, though Wanger’s ire at those who fault Brooke is passionately convincing.

Both new to the Cygnet: Trip is played by Geoffry Ulysses Geissinger, and Brooke by Melanie Lora. The peevish Geissinger, going from zero to 60, does outrage well.

So much of the play depends on Lora’s distraught, nervous Brooke. It’s in the Greek tradition to ignore the message and blame the messenger. The messenger elicits sympathy; Brooke’s intentional showdown leads the family to its precipice. Lora moves to the edge and backs off with quiet dismay and fulminating anger. She provides a study in an actor learning how to be vulnerable one minute, self-assured the next, as she pierces or deflects the arrows of the family demands.

* * *

In the second act, the production finds its rhythm as the acidic humor gives way to grief. Deep in the night, no one sleeps. They pace, they brood, they read. Antsy Brooke wants Trip’s opinion. She gets it. Yes, the book is her truth, and yes, she has the right to publish it, and yes, the only obligation she has, in the end, is to herself. But, Trip asks, why come home to flail the family’s putative togetherness during Christmas? And why the title? Love & Mercy: A Memoir. Love? For whom? Mercy? For whom? Herself, her skewered parents, Henry? For all its storm and stress, he calls it banal.

It dawns on Brooke that hers may be a “flawed version of what happened.” She flounders, and Trip belittles her. Does she think she can get the parents “to give you their blessing to publish a book, which paints them as right-wing sociopaths whose ideology destroyed their children’s lives?” Rhetorical yes. Helpful, hardly. But it’s further proof that mercilessness is the Wyeths’ addiction, with Trip the newest member of the cult. A minute later, he excoriates Brooke for not seeing how good their parents have been to her. Because this memoir “will kill them.”

Lyman remains room-locked, refusing to read the book, but Polly saunters out, calling it “fiction. As a novel, it might be fun.” Awakened, Silda joins in the fracas to again take Brooke’s side. She lectures Polly: “There’s no one to protect anymore. That Life magazine view of the world is gone. No one cares, now, because, well, nobody even reads anymore anyhow.”

Charges and counter-charges shred what remains of the family’s dignity. Polly: “You’ve written an entire book based on the premise that we drove our son to suicide, but only after years of incubating him as a murderer,” that is, helping him evade the law. She reads a snippet aloud that allegedly shows Lyman abusing Henry. Lyman denies the abuse, apoplectic that he’s “losing another child” through Brooke’s testament.

Brooke presses on. She blames her parents for alerting the police after Henry fled and took his life. We reach the first of several dramatic pinnacles — a family interacting not with verified facts, but with each person’s self-serving rendition of what occurred the night he left. Polly shrugs and declares that the 21st-century American family is one in which the parents’ post-child-raising lives are reckoned as failures—by their adult children!

“This is beyond repair,” she shouts. Trip, convinced of Brooke’s betrayal, cries out that the people depicted in her book “are not the same as the ones who brought me up.” Even Henry’s point of view shows up when Lyman recalls Henry telling his father after he and his activist friends had killed the “homeless veteran” that the poor man was just one dead; the U.S. military killed “millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians.” Silda attacks Polly for supporting the ginned-up War in Iraq because Polly and Lyman “occasionally dine” with his dad, Poppy. Silda rings the moral bell, enraged how elections legitimize authoritarians, presidents who do as they please, a theme that may sting audiences today.

At last, a livid Lyman utters the unutterable. If Brooke publishes, “I’ll never be able to love you again.” Another pinnacle, and it ushers in the first of two mind-bending, play-ending confessions. Suffice it to say a dazed Brooke learns her story is ridden with cracks and holes because she’s doesn’t know “the whole story.” Not by a mile.

Other Desert Cities is bent on heralding one family’s ravaged heart, and something like a resolution ensues before the curtain drops. Everyone’s harmed, everyone’s a victim. The play presents Brooke’s version of the past as a grand confessional failure. Perhaps this is Baitz’s comment on the blinkered limitation of the memoir and why multiple points-of-view novels and plays endure.

* * *

Once a family autobiography is published by a reluctant but necessary insider, the book garners a museum feel — the written tale is “true” largely because the taleteller gave it a life of its own: affixed on pages, squeezed between covers, for sale on Amazon. Writing a memoir teaches you what a family is more often than not — a tribe of self-enablers probably requiring intervention or, at least, treatment. The memoir would not be important if the collective unspokenness of the family were not more important. That may be the one true source of the book’s need to contest the past, designed, I fear, to promise and elude resolution.