Local Playwright Strikes Broadway Gold

Though it is movie-award season now, next spring will see the release of Tony Award nominations for the best work in the 2011-2012 theater season. Having an excellent chance to make the short list for Best Play is “Other Desert Cities,” a five-character drama written by Sag Harbor resident Jon Robin Baitz.

The well-known playwright has also had several good experiences in television. In 1991, he wrote a script about his parents titled “Three Hotels,” which aired on “American Playhouse” on PBS. It was then converted into a stage work that earned Mr. Baitz a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding New Play. Two years later, a script that he wrote for the Showtime anthology series “Fallen Angels” was directed by Tom Cruise.

During their critically praised runs on TV, Mr. Baitz also wrote for the shows “The West Wing” and “Alias.” He then created the show “Brothers & Sisters” and was its original executive producer. The series starred Sally Field as the matriarch of a family of siblings enduring various conflicts. It premiered on ABC in September 2006 and had a healthy five-year run, finishing last May.

But in the middle of his success, things went south for Mr. Baitz. After the first year, irreconcilable differences with network executives led to him being taken off the show. With wounds to lick, Mr. Baitz went east—to his home in Sag Harbor.

“By losing that TV show, by feeling ill-used and broken in the wake of my firing, I had to start from scratch, to learn to write and think again,” Mr. Baitz said during a telephone interview last weekend about what was essentially a year-long retreat. “‘Other Desert Cities’ is the result of that.”

The modern-day drama has received nothing but kudos from critics as well as robust ticket sales. Mr. Baitz is also enjoying a “comeback” of sorts in the theater. An article on the playwright, who is on the faculty of Stony Brook Southampton’s MFA in Theatre in Film Program, in The Daily Beast in November was titled “Broadway’s Comeback Kid,” and along with David Henry Hwang and Larry Kramer, Mr. Baitz was cited in the “Biggest Comebacks” of 2011 listing in the December 12 edition of New York Magazine.

He is taking such things in stride.

“I believe in comebacks, they make for easy ways to quantify an artist’s trajectory,” Mr. Baitz said. “I was flattered.”

But he has never really been away. Except for the year of recuperation in Sag Harbor when his latest play was gestating, Mr. Baitz has produced a steady stream of work, most of it for the stage.

Though born in 1961 in Los Angeles, a city not known for being gracious to writers, he was raised in Brazil and South Africa where his father worked for the Carnation Company. He attended Beverly Hills High School and then found work as an assistant to a couple of film producers. He wrote a one-act play about them, and encouraged by how it turned out, he wrote “The Film Society,” a two-act play about a prep school in South Africa.

A production in Los Angeles in 1987 received enough praise that it was followed by an off-Broadway version starring Nathan Lane, earning Mr. Baitz his first Drama Desk nomination. His next plays produced in New York were “The End of the Day” with Roger Rees and “The Substance of Fire” with Ron Rifkin and Sarah Jessica Parker.

Mr. Baitz’s detours into screen work also included acting; notably in the film “Last Summer in the Hamptons” and alongside Michelle Pfeiffer and George Clooney in “One Fine Day.” But throughout his prolific career, Mr. Baitz remained focused on the stage. In 1996, his play, “A Fair Country,” placed him as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Some readers may recall that his adaptation of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” was mounted at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor starring Kate Burton; it had originated in Los Angeles with Annette Bening. Subsequent plays included “Ten Unknowns” starring Donald Sutherland and Julianna Margulies, and the screenplay of “People I Know” made it to the big screen with Al Pacino.

But after his “Brothers & Sisters” derailment, Mr. Baitz needed some time away from the stage, and writing in general. He left Los Angeles and returned to the East End.

“I went out to my little Sag Harbor house and I sat in silence for over a year,” he said. I was extremely unhappy at first. And angry.”

When he was not in Sag Harbor, he was teaching, which included being the 2009-2010 artist-in-residence at the New School for Drama, with the course being, ironically, on writing for television.

“Other Desert Cities,” which now stars Stockard Channing, Stacy Keach, Rachel Griffiths, Judith Light and Thomas Sadoski, appears to have settled in for a long run in one place at the Booth Theatre. Its initial opening was at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center last January.

Ben Brantley in The New York Times noted especially that it was “gorgeously acted” and that “you probably need to see it five times. That’s because there are five members in the cast of this ripping family drama of politics, domestic and otherwise, and you never want to take your eyes off a single one of them.”

The play, directed by Joe Mantello (who should also expect a Tony nod), was not difficult to cast, particularly the leads, Mr. Baitz said.

“I wrote very much for Stockard and Stacy and was lucky enough that they were persuaded to do the parts,” he said. “I knew both of them well, having worked with Stacy before and being friendly with Stockard.”

The play is very much about a family, with its author able to explore issues and relationships in a direction that the ABC executives did not want him to go. Playing the role of Brooke, Ms. Griffiths—who was also a lead on “Brothers & Sisters”—visits her parents—a former chairman of the Republican Party and his wise-cracking wife—played by Mr. Keach and Ms. Channing, in Palm Springs to tell them about a memoir she has written. The book details the family’s troubled past and the death of her brother many years earlier.

Also on hand is another brother—played by Mr. Sadoski, whose character is a producer of TV reality shows—and the mother’s alcoholic sister, who is played by Ms. Light.

Much of the action on stage can be gut-wrenching as the family members are at times nasty and victimized, weak and almost heroic, but as Mr. Brantley described it, the play is “the most richly enjoyable new play for grown-ups that New York has known in many a season.”

The critical and popular success of “Other Desert Cities” has been a personal revival for Mr. Baitz. There is no sitting in silence in Sag Harbor anticipated; at least in the near future. He has been working on a stage adaptation of two autobiographies written by the film producer Robert Evans— known for such movies as “The Godfather,” “Love Story,” and “Chinatown”—during a long and tumultuous career in Hollywood, which also included seven marriages.

And being in a better place in his career means that no one should be concerned about encountering Mr. Baitz on Main Street, he joked.

“I have very practiced manners, which are usually on the forefront of my mind,” he said. “I also never fire the first shot, and very seldom even do I return fire.”

The exception, of course, is when it benefits those seeking quality entertainment on the stage, television, or at the theater.