The Neoliberal Tyrones in Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities

ABSTRACT:With his 2011 play Other Desert Cities, Jon Robin Baitz creates an afterlife of Eugene O'Neill's Tyrone family in a modern-day, mediatized performance context where film and television dominate. Baitz reimagines the Tyrones as the Wyeths, a famous Hollywood family with connections to Ronald Reagan's political circles, to illustrate how a family conditioned by performance can be exploited by political ideologies, in this case neoliberalism. Like the Tyrones, the Wyeths made their living in performance, a discipline that continues to structure their daily interactions with each other. This environment of constant performance collapses the boundary between their private lives and their sociopolitical worlds, thereby rendering their entire existence as a performance tool for furthering neoliberal goals. Baitz situates his play in the domestic dramatic tradition of Long Day's Journey Into Night to illustrate the value of theatre in exposing the artifice behind mediatized political performance.