The familiar give and take of family secrets and threatened revelations gets a Hollywood shine and sociopolitical update in ACT’s production of Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities (through June 30). Hamstrung by an under-rehearsed cast and a weak-jointed plot, the show still provides an amusing, if sentimental, evening of entertainment.

Marya Sea Kaminsky plays Brooke Wyeth, the liberal novelist daughter of prominent Republican and former Hollywood celebrity parents, who goes home to Palm Springs at Christmas for the first time in six years. The holiday is just a small turn of the dramatic screw. Her ostensible reason for returning home is to present her soon-to-be-published tell-all memoir to her family but to what end? She says she wants their blessing for dragging out the family’s tragic past, but claims surprise at their defensive response. That’s one of the two key weaknesses in the framing of this story.

While costumes, set and lights are all top quality, the acting and directing are lacking: Opening night saw some stumbling over lines and the opening scene struggled to find its feet. While we are dealing with a show-business family that does the soft-shoe of normality, Victor Pappas’s cast oversells the façade. Their indicating of false cheer comes off as bad acting. This mellows in later scenes as the play stops trying to be funny and the cast lives in their roles instead of playing actors acting.

While fans of Baitz’s Brothers and Sisters—TV’s overwrought family drama of the over-class—should be sure to catch this show, Other Desert Cities gives us more than just television fare presented on the stage. It also contains both subtle and overt sociopolitical implications that will hook more discriminating audiences along with some fine character work.

Though a few references remind us that events unfold in 2004, Brendan Patrick Hogan’s curtain-raising collage of sound bites sets the scene most directly kicking off with Rumsfeld and Bush. This consciousness is reinforced as each character describes the others as representative of the political divisiveness demonstrated in national politics. Notably Polly (Pamela Reed), Brooke’s unforgiving mother, tosses off references to her daughter as a whining liberal, almost from her first entrance. The red, blue, and purple members of the family quickly come into focus.

As the conflict simmers between Brooke and her parents, further family dynamics take hold, and for much of the play, the cast gives authentic life to complicated characters who are difficult to love. Polly’s sister, Silda (Lori Larsen), and Brooke’s brother, Trip (Aaron Blakely), act as Brooke’s worse and better angels, with Trip serving as family peacemaker. Between Silda and Polly’s sororal conflict and the sparring between Brooke and her mother, women in the audience have much fodder for catharsis. For this reviewer, there was interest without epiphany and release with little tension.

An eleventh-hour revelation is a bookending weak point that damages the plot’s credibility and sets up a satisfyingly ambiguous ending that elicited applause from the opening night audience. But don’t get up from your seats quite yet. Baitz is more interested in providing comfort than asking questions, so he leaves us with a sentimental coda that wraps us in a fuzzy blanket of optimism.

In sum Other Desert Cities falls in a grand tradition of American theatre, though written to sitcom standards, suggesting a weightier version of A.R. Gurney or a lighter take on Edward Albee. Given a couple weeks for the cast to shore up their lines and settle into their characters this production will offer pleasant pre-Independence Day national soul-searching without assigning any serious homework on the subject.