Other Family Stories

If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.

—Emile Zola (Dreyfus, 1937)

In every family there are stories that are repeated to the point of becoming lore. However, each member also creates his own idiosyncratic version of events, constructed through his unique heuristic. We each look into the kaleidoscope, with its distinctive hues and shapes generating our perceptive field, and with what we see, alongside with what we are told, we come to devise assumptions about our reality. There are also the facts that we are not told or those that we perceive but are not spoken; these we intuit, avow, repress, or dissociate depending upon how nurturing or devastating they may be. If we are fortunate, the missing pieces are either of minimal salience or support the version of events that we have constructed for ourselves. At their worst, they haunt us as we grapple along in our attempts to reconcile differing landscapes, whispering to us that we don't know what others insist we do, or know what we must not acknowledge lest we dare to pierce the protective shield laid down within our family narrative. Consciousness is indeed a social phenomenon (Stern, 1997), and there is no place where this is truer than within the society of a family.

Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 when it ran first off and then on Broadway in New York. Performed recently by Denver Society for the Performing Arts, the play tells the story of the Wyeths, a family of writers, actors, politicians, and a reality-television producer. The four Wyeths, patriarch Lyman, matriarch Polly, daughter Brooke, son Tripp, as well as Polly's, recently released from rehab, sister Silda, gather for Christmas at Lyman and Polly's Palm Springs home in 2004, Brooke's first visit from New York in six years.

The play starts with volleying, as the four Wye