The play's events occur around Christmas Eve 2004, when the family of Polly and Lyman Wyeth gather in Palm Springs, California.

The sisters co-wrote a series of MGM comedies in the 1960s, but have since become estranged chiefly due to Silda's resenting Polly for shifting social worldviews over time.

During the course of the story, Brooke experiences bitter conflict between her yearning for independent understanding and reliance, and her parents' doting yet secretive motives towards her.

In an act of submission from Lyman, he and Polly finally recount the specifics surrounding the recruitment center bombing Henry was implicated in, after years of personal clashes and rejection from both parents and son.

Brooke, in the play's penultimate moment, launches all the pages of her memoir into the air in anguish, screaming of her internal suffering since Henry left her life, and trying to spare her parents the potential pain of her suicide despite her continual grief.

Ben Brantley, in his review of the Broadway production for The New York Times, wrote that the play (Off-Broadway) was "...the most thoroughly integrated and sustained work from Mr. Baitz, who had been regarded as a promising wunderkind for long past his sell-by date."

Brantley went on to write: "... directed with a masterly combination of shadow and shimmer by Joe Mantello, emerges as stronger, more sincere and more credible in its Broadway reincarnation.

"[10] The reviewer for The Hollywood Reporter (of the Broadway production) noted that "When it premiered in January, Jon Robin Baitz’s first new play in six years, 'Other Desert Cities', was smart and entertaining.

With discreet adjustments to the text and more penetrating characterizations all around from the sterling cast, the balance between comedy and intense family drama has been fine-tuned in richly satisfying ways.