Many months ago, when the British playwright Jez Butterworth was starting to ponder the subject for his next work, he was watching a spider build a web in the doorway of his farmhouse in Devon. The sun illuminated each delicate strand as the arachnid labored. “And it didn’t know,” he tells me, “that my dog was going to come running through that doorway from his walk and just smash the whole thing to shit.”
That idea—of investing heart and soul in something precarious and fragile, only to have it carelessly destroyed—stayed with the playwright as he began writing The Hills of California, which opens at Broadway’s Broadhurst this month after a run on London’s West End. Hills is the story of a mother, Veronica, and the four daughters she is raising by herself in 1950s Blackpool, a seaside resort town in Lancashire that was once something like the Atlantic City of England—a place for frothy diversions and bad behavior. Veronica and her daughters live in and run the Sea View Guesthouse (no seaside visible), where the quarters are named Minnesota, Indiana, Alabama, and so on; Blackpool may have a boardwalk, but the dream is on the other side of the ocean. “The hills of California will give you a start,” sings Johnny Mercer in the classic American standard—part of the girls’ choreographed act. “I guess I better warn ya, ’cause you’ll lose your heart.”
Veronica is painstakingly cultivating her daughters as a quartet in the mold of the Andrews Sisters, the harmonizing group from Minneapolis that rose from humble beginnings in the 1930s and ’40s to help define the sound of the boogie-woogie era. The hammy bops that propelled the group to fame are on the way out, but Veronica is unaware and undaunted. “Have you heard of Elvis Presley?” asks a talent scout type who shows up to assess the girls. “I don’t know what that is,” she replies.
This is the “before” of the play, but Hills of California actually opens in the “after,” about 20 years later, in 1976. The girls are grown, and Veronica, an unseen presence in the towering, multistory boarding house, is dying, upstairs and offstage. The youngest sister, Jillian—dutiful and made a little timid by the small scope of her life—has never left home, while the two middle sisters (Gloria and Ruby) are heading to their mother’s deathbed with various degrees of dread. Joan, the oldest sister, has been gone for years—she actually did make it to America, though the more you learn of her journey the less triumphant it seems.
The play flips—literally, the set rotates to indicate temporal shifts—between the two eras: the before, a time of youth, possibility, and ambition; and the after, with its dashed dreams and unfulfilled promises. If this all seems a rather bleak agenda, anyone familiar with Butterworth’s writing will know that the play doesn’t occupy one register for long. Like all of his plays (this is his eighth; his most recent, The Ferryman, won the 2019 Tony for best play, among other honors), it traverses broad and fertile terrain: the unpredictability of cultural changes, the relationship between parents and offspring, the force of ambition, the sense of time running out.
“He’s kind of a rock star, Jez is,” says the play’s Broadway director, Sam Mendes, who shepherded the West End production of Hills earlier this year. Mendes was a few years ahead of Butterworth at Cambridge University and followed the playwright’s early career with admiration and a dose of healthy jealousy. “He sort of breezed onto the scene in a really effortless way, but didn’t seem to be an intellectual or wannabe. There seemed to be something raw about him,” Mendes says. “And there still is.” The two have become collaborators (Mendes also directed The Ferryman) and friends; they used to have seats next to each other at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, and Mendes first became aware of the new play when Butterworth came to his house to watch a match. “My wife, Ali, said, ‘What’s that at the bottom of the coat closet covered in coffee stains?’ ” Mendes recalls. “And he was like, ‘Oh yeah, I brought that for Sam.’ ” Butterworth told him it was his new play, that he should have a look. “I was like, Fuck, I’ll read that. It wasn’t the act of a friend. It was because I wanted to know what Jez Butterworth was writing next.”
Hills is one of those plays in which you can sense a lifetime of simmering tensions and rivalries, but also a lifetime of love and care, within the opening scene. “Very few writers provide you with a fully created and a fully imagined world,” says Mendes. “And by which I mean not imagined onstage, but offstage as well.” Each of the four main actors who play the adult sisters—Laura Donnelly (Joan, the oldest, as well as Veronica in the 1950s section), Leanne Best (Gloria), Ophelia Lovibond (Ruby), and Helena Wilson (Jill, the youngest)—received just a few pages when they auditioned, but each of them spoke of the way it conjured an entire era and emotional atmosphere. “It was just shouting from the page, who these people were,” says Lovibond. “There was such a rich world there,” agrees Donnelly, who with her twin roles across two time periods has perhaps the most challenging performance in the play. (She also happens to be married to Butterworth—an element of her professional life that, remarkably, does not seem to introduce much friction. “Laura just sort of goes into this zone in order to be able to do the show eight times a week,” says Butterworth. “I’m on morning coffee duty and cooking tea when she gets home. But she doesn’t come back and throw the tea cups around and complain.”)
Best is one of six children herself, and understands the dynamics of large families: “Your family knows which button to push because they put them there,” she jokes. These are ordinary women in some ways, she says, failing to overcome the parameters of their pedestrian lives, but “there’s no such thing as ordinary people; you will never come across an ordinary person.” Wilson, also, saw this juxtaposition between the quotidian and the exceptional the first time she read the play: “It’s domestic. It’s a crumbling seaside hotel in a crumbling seaside town, and yet it’s transcendent and epic and emotionally huge.”
One has the sense, watching a Butterworth play, that he must have lived through the Irish Troubles (the milieu in which The Ferryman is set) or cut his teeth in a seedy Soho nightclub (the setting for Mojo, his first play) or spent serious time amid hard-partying riffraff in Wiltshire (Jerusalem). Watching Hills, you feel that he must have come of age in 1950s Blackpool, sweeping the planks of his mother’s boardinghouse while listening to a staticky radio broadcast. And yet: “Tennessee Williams said that all of his plays add up to an emotional autobiography,” Butterworth tells me, “but nothing that’s happening onstage has happened to him in the way that it is being portrayed.” In this way, he built the family in Hills from memory. One of five children, Butterworth grew up “in rooms where you had to fight your corner to be heard.” The four Butterworth brothers (there was one sister, the eldest) all shared a bedroom, and it was all very “hugger mugger,” as he puts it. If you wanted to get people’s attention, he says, “your material had to be good.” He surveyed his brothers during the early phases of writing this play and asked them to remember specific turns of phrase that their own father used; some of them ended up in the script.
When Butterworth’s adult sister fell ill with brain cancer, he brought her to a cottage on his property in Somerset, and the brothers gathered before she died in 2012. He is, unlike the characters in the play, immensely close to all his grown-up siblings, and it was a family communion he drew upon. With Hills, he wanted to get at the varied ways that children can experience the death of a parent. He describes attending another funeral where he watched three brothers process the death of their mother: “One of them was just hugely, hugely grateful for the life that she’d had. One of them was ‘Move along, nothing to see.’ And one of them was absolutely devastated. And I remember seeing one of them just disappear behind the church into the darkness and the fog, and I just thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got it.’ ”
Equally important is what our parents do to us while they’re alive. Butterworth has four daughters, two from a previous marriage to the former film editor Gilly Butterworth and two from his current marriage to Donnelly, and so of course he lives with a parental perspective as well as a filial and brotherly one. Early on, the idea came to Butterworth that he would have the same actor play Veronica and the adult Joan (the sister who suffers the worst consequences of her mother’s ambition)—a kind of mirroring of cause and effect. “I wanted to create a moment where somebody, a parent, makes an unforgivable decision, but you understand exactly why and how it comes about,” he says.
That unforgivable decision is precipitated by the appearance of a music producer who seems to hold the keys to opportunity for the young girls and abuses that power for his own shameful ends. Until then, the play has really been about women; there are men present, but they are bumbling and ineffectual, and ushered to the periphery. The music producer introduces an entirely new dynamic: He preys upon and disrupts the fragile dreams the women have built. (Without giving too much away, it’s worth mentioning that Jez Butterworth once worked with Harvey Weinstein on his first and only film as a director, an adaptation of Mojo, in 1997. “The reason why it was the last film I ever directed,” he tells me, “was that Harvey made sure that was the case.”)
Butterworth didn’t set out to write a play about women suffering the abuse of men, but, he says, “without me really meaning to, all of the people that walked onto the stage were women.” What happens, if you are a thoughtful male director taking on such a work, says Mendes, is that you begin to think “about one’s own mother, one’s own wife, and one’s own daughters. It’s inevitable. So I asked a lot of questions, and I felt it was very important to say, ‘Does this feel real? Does this chime with your experience?’ ”
“We, as actors, very often have the conversation that society fails to have,” says Donnelly, reflecting on the stickiest, toughest part of the play—and her earlier years as an actor. “I can see that there was at best a lack of responsibility. And a blurring of lines that we today now know as inappropriate,” she says. “And I feel like I’ve been very lucky. I have not been on the sharp end of that in my career. But I can certainly see moments when I think, Had I been less sure of myself, had it been a bigger job that I felt more vulnerable in, had those people perhaps been bigger and more successful than they were….”
Best came to acting somewhat later than many of the other women. “I kind of had already turned myself into a human car alarm,” she says, joking. “I had made myself the promise that I would never ignore my intuition. I had done it before, and it had cost me dearly.” She speaks of reassuring conversations on these issues that she’s had with a younger castmate. That actor, she said, felt permission to point out what she felt wasn’t right. In this younger generation, Best sees an articulate rage that is also practical: “She was like, ‘I know what that is. I’m angry about it and it’s not okay.’ She was so clear. And I was like, ‘Goddamn, we’re doing something right.’ ”
All the actors are taking a moment between the West End and Broadway productions to gird themselves for this new iteration of this play. “By the time we finished” the London run, says Best, “we all made sure there was no juice left in the orange.” It is a play that asks a lot of its performers. “Sam would say to us,” recounts Lovibond, “you’ve got to really dredge, and he’d kind of clench his hand into a fist to draw it from his stomach up towards his esophagus.” Donnelly, who also starred in The Ferryman, elaborates on the unique demands: “I think I can speak for all of us women in that, as much as we got more out of this play than any other job, it also took more out of us.”
But they are also approaching this new outing with excitement for what audiences will get to experience. “Jez’s work is particular and universal,” says Wilson. “We are bringing what feels to us like quite a niche world, but actually it’s not. The process of sharing it has only shown us—over the last 20 weeks in the West End, and then hopefully again in New York—it is universal.”
In this story: hair, Shon Hyungsun Ju; makeup, Kirstin Piggott; grooming, Sky Cripps-Jackson; tailor, Megan O’Connor; manicurist, Hayley Evans-Smith. Produced by The Arcade Production.
