A Matriarch at the Hudson, Julia Louis-Dreyfus on Broadway

On a summer afternoon, before a late lunch with Vogue, Julia Louis-Dreyfus got her first tour of the Hudson Theatre and walked out onto its stage. She liked what she found. "It's a great theater because it is intimate," she told the magazine. "People aren't super far away."

That closeness is about to be tested. On Tuesday, September 29, the revival of Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities begins previews at the Hudson, with Louis-Dreyfus as Polly Wyeth, the matriarch at its center. Opening night is Sunday, October 18. The run is a limited one, sixteen weeks, and it ends January 17, 2027. It is her Broadway debut.

For most performers that phrase means a first big break. For Louis-Dreyfus it means something stranger. She is the woman behind Elaine Benes and Selina Meyer, two of the sharpest comic creations television has produced. She has nothing left to prove on a soundstage. So she has chosen a room with no second takes, in front of people who paid to watch her get it right every single night.

The Woman Behind the Manners

Polly is not a warm part. Vogue, which put Louis-Dreyfus in its September issue in portraits by Annie Leibovitz, sketches the character as a conservative of the country club set, with polished manners and a charm built for defense. The play is set on Christmas Eve 2004 in the family's Palm Springs house. Brooke, the Wyeths' daughter and a writer, arrives after six years away, and she has brought the manuscript of a memoir with her. The book is about Brooke's late brother and the family's official version of how he died. Polly has spent decades guarding that version. The memoir threatens to tear it open.

Louis-Dreyfus has an unsentimental read on what that feels like from Polly's side. The memoir, she told Vogue, "is like a murder." She knew the type on sight. She grew up in New York and Washington, D.C., and as Vogue tells it, women like Polly were part of the scenery in both. "This is a woman who has her hair done a couple times a week," she said.

That is the comedy of the role, and also its danger. Polly is funny the way a cut is clean. Under every laugh is a grief the family refuses to name. Louis-Dreyfus built a career on characters who say the wrong thing loudly. Polly says exactly the right thing, quietly, and means to wound.

Polly is funny the way a cut is clean.

A Room Full of Heavyweights

She is not carrying the evening alone. The director, John Benjamin Hickey, has surrounded her with Ed Harris as her husband, Lyman, Allison Janney as her sister, Silda, Lily Rabe as Brooke, and Joe Keery as the younger son, Trip. Hickey called the group "the Knicks lineup" in the Vogue feature. It is hard to argue.

According to Vogue, the cast had read the play through twice by the time the magazine sat down with Louis-Dreyfus, and one of those readings came before she had formally taken the part. Hickey heard enough to give her a single note. Say yes. She did.

Baitz, for his part, was struck by an early table read. He told Out that he noticed "the rawness" of the new company more than its star wattage, and that the actors "felt immediately like a family in a true crisis." Scott Pask, the set designer, is treating the midcentury Palm Springs living room like a boxing ring, Vogue reports. For a family that talks in jabs, it fits.

The play has history in this city. It premiered Off Broadway at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in 2011 and moved to Broadway later that same year. It earned five Tony nominations and was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The revival is its first return to Broadway since. When the revival was announced, Baitz said in a statement quoted by Deadline that he had all but given up on picturing the play in New York again. What unsettles him, he added, is how little its questions have changed in nearly twenty years.

What the Theater Asks For

Louis-Dreyfus has been candid about the physical side of the job. On a recent episode of The Run-Through, Vogue's weekly podcast, she laid out her plan for the long run ahead, a mix of interval training, walking and running, Pilates, and a steady supply of electrolytes. A long run is an athlete's schedule, and she is preparing like one.

She has also spoken openly about loss. On the same podcast she talked about the Palisades Fire, which took the Los Angeles home she had lived in for thirty-two years. Short of losing people she loves, she called it "the great loss." It is a strange echo in a season when Billy Crystal is bringing a new one-man show to the Imperial Theatre. Deadline notes it is named for the address of his home, which the Palisades fires destroyed. Two lost houses, two new chapters, both beginning in Midtown after dark.

A couple of nights before that Vogue lunch, Louis-Dreyfus attended the Tony Awards for the first time. The magazine found her visibly moved by it. There is, she told the magazine, "an earnestness to the theater community that's beautiful." Everyone understands how hard the work is.

How to Get In

The production has made the math a little kinder for anyone hoping to see her up close. As Playbill reports, a digital lottery and a digital rush will each offer tickets at $49. Lottery entries open at 10:30 a.m. Eastern the day before each performance, and winners can buy up to two seats. Rush tickets go on sale at 9 a.m. on the day of the show. With this cast, move fast.

For those who have never waited out a Broadway preview, it is its own kind of night out. The show is still finding itself. It is the closest a paying audience gets to the world of the people waiting in the wings, the kind we met in The Understudy. This is the version of the show that exists before the critics arrive.

After the final bow on those preview nights, the crowd will spill out into the Theater District with the rest of the curtain-down rush. Somewhere behind them, a woman who has conquered every other stage in her business will be getting ready to find Polly all over again the next night.