Julia Louis-Dreyfus will make her Broadway debut this fall in the first Broadway revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities, joining a cast that includes Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Joe Keery and Lily Rabe. The 16-week limited engagement will begin previews Tuesday, Sept. 29 at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre, open Sunday, Oct. 18 and run through Sunday, Jan. 17, 2027.
The production gives Louis-Dreyfus, a seven-time Emmy Award winner, a long-awaited turn on Broadway in a play that has already had one life on the New York stage and then some. Baitz’s drama premiered Off-Broadway at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center Theater in 2011, transferred to Broadway later that year and went on to earn five nominations at the 66th Tony Awards, with Judith Light winning best featured actress in a play. The play was also a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Set on Christmas Eve in a sunlit Palm Springs home, Other Desert Cities centers on a politically connected family when a daughter comes home with a memoir that threatens to expose a hidden truth the family has kept from the world. That mix of wealth, politics and family damage is part of why the play has lasted, and why its return now feels designed to test whether its arguments still sting in 2026 as much as they did in 2011.
Directing the revival is John Benjamin Hickey, who said he has loved Baitz’s plays since early in his career and was stunned by how relevant Other Desert Cities remains, calling it an American family story that feels even more current now. Baitz said he had more or less talked himself out of imagining the play back in New York, but trusted Hickey completely and believed the ensemble could find what was still alive in it. He also pointed to the play’s central question, nearly 20 years on: how to live with who we are and what we have done, and call that a life.
For Broadway, the revival is more than a nostalgia booking. It reunites a play that already proved it could travel from Off-Broadway to Broadway and collect awards along the way, now carrying a cast built for attention and a director who sees the piece as both funny and heartbreaking. The question is whether a family secret set against a glittering Palm Springs Christmas Eve will land as a portrait of one family, or of a country still arguing with itself.
