With their collaboration on 2017’s The Ferryman, playwright Jez Butterworth, director Sam Mendes, designer Rob Howell, and producer Sonia Friedman found great success with an epic play about a Northern Irish family during The Troubles. Its Broadway transfer the following year garnered Tony Awards for each of them. Now, the band has reassembled with Butterworth’s new play The Hills of California, on Broadway after a West End run earlier this year.
It’s a very different play. The Ferryman’s persistent threat of violence and throat-clutching tension are replaced with the kind of violence and tension that occur around the dinner table. Veronica Webb runs a guesthouse in 1955 Blackpool, England. Her four daughters have created a family band modeled after the Andrews Sisters and Veronica is set on getting them to stardom. In alternating timelines, we see Veronica’s daughters Jill, Ruby, Gloria, and Joan as children and, twenty-one years later, as adults when they return to the guesthouse to visit their mother on her deathbed.
The play’s pleasures come from Butterworth’s crackling dialogue, giving each of the sisters their own particular way of zinging at the others. The dynamic nails what having an adult sibling is like and the actresses who play the older versions, Helena Wilson, Ophelia Lovibond, Leanne Best, and Laura Donnelly have truly stunning chemistry. They feel like pieces of a very weathered puzzle that will still link tightly with a bit of a push.
Donnelly is extraordinary in her dual roles as 1976 Joan in the play’s final act and as 1955 Veronica in the rest of the play. The part was written for her, just as The Ferryman was based on her family, and it’s the rare example of a playwright creating roles for his partner that are expertly tailored to her gifts. Donnelly’s Veronica has a typically British stiff upper lip, but behind her eyes, there’s anger and desperation. Her Joan is all loose Laurel Canyon, with a slow, languorous “it’s cool, man” way of speaking. How this girl from Blackpool became, essentially, Janis Joplin is the play’s central plot, unfolding in stunning fashion thanks to Butterworth’s dialogue and the intelligent characterization of its actresses.
An artist of Sam Mendes’ stature could easily rest on his laurels, but in the past few years, he has been turning out some career-best work. The Hills of California is no exception. Mendes knows how to stage – even in the relatively shallow playing space of the front parlor (seen in the 1976 scenes), the characters never feel static or like we’re seeing them in repeated positions. The back kitchen (seen in the 1955 scenes) has an openness that doubles as a metaphor for childhood. Before the world clamps down on you, there’s freedom and possibility. The two rooms, on alternating sides of Howell’s clever turntable, symbolize the changes in the Webb sisters’ lives.
Mendes is also excellent at establishing mood and nailing the tone of a play. The Hills of California doesn’t feel elegiac or precious; the past is haunting, but like a poltergeist that has poked at these women every day. The shadowy lighting by Natasha Chivers and soundscape by Nick Powell contribute to this overwhelming sense of unresolved trauma and resentment that seeps through the play.
Jez Butterworth has cemented himself as a can’t-miss writer and, with Mendes at the helm, his productions have the sumptuous feel of a bygone age. Butterworth and Mendes are not hemmed in by the sort of intermission-less contemporary drama that has its fans. Instead, they know that audiences will sit for a three-act play if that three-act play makes them want to. And during The Hills of California, I was definitely there for it.