Wrestling With Truth

Playwright goes to Hollywood. Playwright creates hit TV show. Playwright gets ousted from said show, goes public with his hatred of LA and all it stands for. Playwright returns to writing for the stage, with spectacular success. That's more or less the story of Jon Robin Baitz, erstwhile creator of hit TV show Brothers & Sisters and more recently the author of Other Desert Cities, a Pulitzer-nominated Broadway play.

Sacha Horler plays Brooke Wyeth, a character whose story echoes Baitz's in many ways. Horler points out the parallels. “[Baitz] lives in Sag Harbor, my character lives in Sag Harbour. My character had a full break down. He publicly said that after being 'moved on' from Brothers & Sisters... he had some kind of breakdown, as a rejection of LA, and all its absurdity and vanity and revoltingness. He went back to his real love, which is writing real people the real way, so to speak. Which is what my character does too.”

That's where the similarities end though. Where Baitz returned to writing theatre, his creation Brooke pens a devastating family memoir. The daughter of two arch-conservative parents – a Republican former senator and his Hollywood screenwriter wife – Brooke is a writer who needs to resurrect her career. She tackles her family history, including the death of her brother. As the family gathers in the desert town of Palm Springs for Christmas, the clash between Brooke's version of the story and that of her parents comes to the surface.

Horler likens Brooke's story to that of Patti Davis, Ronald Reagan's 'black sheep' daughter whose tell-all memoirs brought embarrassment to her family. The scrutiny that politicians' personal lives come under is significant, but as Horler points out, they aren't the only ones to fear seeing their lives on the page. “I think that it has always been a contentious area to write about people who are living... as soon as you write books that include your ex-lovers or ex-husbands, your children or boyfriends, there are always going to be people who say 'that's not how I saw it... It never happened like that'. The play is really dealing with divergent truth.

“I think if I thought I'd written a really rip-roaring history of [my family], that I would probably be as blind as Brooke is in some regards to the impact of it. You [would] think 'look what I've written! It's fairly brilliant! Shouldn't people be reading this?'” She laughs. “And then you'd find out it was offensive to people, or inflammatory, or not how they saw it.”

Horler, whose parents Ken and Lilian Horler co-founded The Nimrod Theatre (now the Griffin Theatre) in Sydney, might appear to hail from a very different world to Brooke's stuffy upbringing. But she can relate to her story nonetheless. “What I do identify with fairly clearly is the relationship one has with one's parents about who owns the truth of [the past]... I remember the absolute certainty you have of some major event in your life, and it's outrageous to you that someone could have forgotten a moment or read it in a different way. I think that is something that we can all identify with.”