The Hudson Theatre has hosted plenty of comeback stories. This fall it gets something rarer: a genuine first. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the most Emmy-laden television actress alive, will make her Broadway debut in a revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s “Other Desert Cities,” according to a report from Variety published this week.
The play is not exactly an obscure choice. Baitz’s 2011 original ran 109 performances at Lincoln Center before transferring to Broadway, where it picked up six Tony nominations. The story follows the Wyeth family — old-money Republican Palm Springs stock — rattled when the youngest daughter returns home with a memoir that digs up a buried chapter of the family’s past. It is the kind of play that gets described as “a dinner party that turns into a deposition.”
Louis-Dreyfus will lead the revival alongside Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Joe Keery, and Lily Rabe. The casting is, by any measure, outsized for a single stage. Harris has his own Broadway history. Janney, likewise. Keery, best known to the algorithm as Steve Harrington from “Stranger Things,” brings the streaming audience. Rabe is simply one of the more reliable stage performers working right now.
What the announcement turns on, though, is the debut. Louis-Dreyfus has spent roughly four decades collecting television hardware — “Seinfeld,” “The New Adventures of Old Christine,” six straight Emmys for “Veep” — without once crossing into legitimate theatre. That changes this fall at a 1,000-seat house on West 44th Street. Ticket availability had not been announced at the time of the Variety report.