There’s a moment about halfway through Other Desert Cities, an inexplicably over-praised Broadway mediocrity, at which it becomes clear that we are intended to take seriously the political rantings of one of the play’s characters, a washed-up, alcoholic Hollywood liberal. Until that moment, the play’s political content, which is ample, had merely provided conversational fodder to fuel the family drama at the play’s center, and the character had been a kind of affable cartoon; afterward, the politics take a starring role, which is unfortunate, because the politics are of the rigidly conventional and remorselessly stupid kind.

Other Desert Citiesis the story of Brooke Wyeth (Rachel Griffiths), a young(ish) woman who wrote one well-received novel and then ceased writing after falling into the grip of a particularly fearsome case of manic depression, that notorious bane of the upper classes. Years later, she has returned with a memoir about her older brother who, during the Vietnam War era, became a radical antiwar activist, joining up with a Symbionese Liberation Army–style terrorist outfit and participating in the bombing of an army recruiting station that resulted in a man’s being burnt to death. Naturally, she worships her brother and blames his descent into left-wing madness on her conservative parents, members of the Hollywood Republican set (because Hollywood is absolutely infested with Republicans, you know). Not having visited her family in six years, Brooke has the good taste to choose a Christmas visit as the occasion upon which to inform them