A new play about family, politics, writing and secrets.

When Paper Wing co-owner Koly McBride first saw Jon Robin Baitz’s 2012 play Other Desert Cities on Broadway four years ago, she did not understand it.

“I liked it,” she says. “But I thought, ‘Paper Wing will never produce this.’”

This weekend, she’s directing it on their Hoffman playhouse stage. What changed? Her family.

“My mom had a stroke, which brought up all these family dynamics that come up [in a] crisis. Things got ugly. I picked up [the play] a year later, and I got it.”

The Pulitzer-nominated dramedy drops in on the affluent Wyeth family of Palm Springs on the morning of Christmas Eve 2004. The matriarch is Polly (played by Carrie Collier), a smart, conservative, Jewish former Hollywood writer; the patriarch is her waspy former ambassador husband Lyman (Keith Decker). The couple’s lefty daughter Brooke (Mindy Whitfield) returns home after six years with a manuscript – a memoir about her family – that may contain incendiary details. Brooke’s brother, Trip (Taylor Landess), is at ease with their wealth, but astute about its costs.

Polly’s sister Silda (Teresa Del Piero), a liberal firecracker who has since slid into alcoholism, visits for the holidays.

Multiple tensions run through the play, including arguements between right and left factions of the family, in confrontations that span the Vietnam War up to the newly launched war in Iraq.

Del Piero, who plays Silda, says, “Everybody has family gatherings at holidays where people start talking politics. It always gets heated.”

Maybe because it’s a way to mask deeper family issues. And there lies another tension: the struggle to keep family secrets private versus Brooke’s fidelity to the truth in her writing.

“My daughter is tap dancing around about this book of hers,” Polly tells her sister Silda. “We’re all sitting around here waiting as if nothing is happening.”

McBride focuses on the crossfire of family dynamics: the hurt and the comfort, the loyalties and betrayals.

“I connect with the duality of being able to love your family and at the same time hate them,” she says.

That can be zoomed out to encompass the “family” that makes up a fractious nation, like ours right now, caught up in a political race that approximates ideological civil war. If all politics is local, in this play, all politics is familial too.

OTHER DESERT CITIES plays 8pm Fri-Sat (2pm March 19) March 11-26 at Paper Wing Hoffman, 320 Hoffman Ave., Monterey. $22-$25. 905-5684, www.PaperWing.com