The most terrifying scene on a Broadway stage at the moment occurs with complete civility.
In the second act of Jez Butterworth’s “The Hills of California,” now at the Broadhurst Theatre in a magnificent production directed by Oscar winner Sam Mendes, Luther St. John (David Wilson Barnes), an American music producer and talent spotter, has arrived at the tacky Seaview hotel in Blackpool, England. The year is 1955. And Veronica (Laura Donnelly), the attractive widow with an iron will who owns the guesthouse, has been grooming her four daughters to be a replica of the Andrews Sisters, the musical sensation of her youth.
Tired of scraping by in a provincial backwater, she is desperate for them to realize her unfulfilled dreams of stardom. The children’s father is said, in various versions of the legend, to have died during World War II. When Veronica’s eldest, 15-year-old Joan (Lara McDonnell), shows up late for practice earlier in the play, she tells her, “You want to spend your nights at Funfair flirting with boys and end up grinding a mangle on Ribble Road with five kids, just keep it up, love. If not, get your arse in line.”
Luther’s arrival is the break Veronica has been waiting for. Her girls, rehearsed within an inch of their lives, knock themselves out doing “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” But as they segue into “Straighten up and Fly Right,” Luther holds up his hand. He’s heard enough. He wants to speak to Veronica in private. Why are they doing covers of yesterday’s music? The public has moved on to Elvis Presley. And in any case, the only girl with star potential is Joan. He might be able to do something for her, but he’d need to hear her sing in private.
Joan, as feisty as her mother, proposes that she sing a hit by one of Luther’s discoveries, Nat King Cole: “When I Fall in Love.” Veronica worries about the appropriateness of the choice. Luther, who has the sinister authority of a mild-mannered Lucifer in a wrinkled suit, makes to leave out of respect for Veronica’s wishes. But Joan knows what this chance means to her mother. She’s willing to do what Veronica knows is wrong. Veronica offers to go upstairs with Luther instead, but he feigns confusion. He only wants to hear the girl sing. Is there a problem? When he follows Joan up the inn’s steep staircase, climbing with predatory stealth, Veronica remains below, shattered.
What happened in that room, the trauma that set a family reeling, is the subject of “The Hills of California,” the most deeply involving play I saw on a recent Broadway trip. The architecture of the drama, set in Veronica’s guesthouse, creates a world that is fully inhabited by the seasoned ensemble, many of whose members were in the play’s world premiere earlier this year in London.
Hauntingly staged by Mendes, who won a Tony for his direction of Butterworth’s “The Ferryman,” “The Hills of California” switches between two time periods. The play begins in 1976, with Veronica dying upstairs in grievous pain from stomach cancer. Jill (Helena Wilson), who has been her mother’s caretaker, has summoned her sisters, Ruby (Ophelia Lovibond) and Gloria (Leanne Best), to be there at the end. Hanging over their vigil is the question of whether Joan will return after a 20-year absence that harks back to Luther’s visit. The sisters have their own interpretation of what took place in that room, but the consequences are not in dispute: Joan got pregnant, had an abortion and was shipped off to America, where she cut an album and then fell off the radar and into the drug scene, living an increasingly sketchy life against the beguiling beauty that inspired the Johnny Mercer song “The Hills of California.”
Butterworth may be the most acclaimed English dramatist of his generation. His play “Jerusalem” often tops surveys of the best British dramas of the 21st century. “The Ferryman” won the Tony Award for best play. I admired aspects of both works but have been unable to summon the enthusiasm of my fellow critics. I expected again to be left in the dissenting cold by “The Hills of California,” but this capacious play has been unfolding in my mind since I saw it.
It’s a long work, nearly three hours, written in the Chekhovian realistic tradition and crammed with novelistic details that can’t be fully assimilated in one sitting. There are characters that could be cut and scenes that could be shortened, but I continue to make retrospective discoveries about the psychology and morality of a contentious family drama that, in its tragicomic extremity and bold black humor, bears comparison with Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County.”
The production’s well-executed climax doesn’t dissolve ambiguity. When adult Joan (played by Donnelly, Butterworth’s partner, who received a Tony nomination for her performance in “The Ferryman”) finally shows up, looking like a bedraggled hippie and talking like a Californian, a doctor has already been called to administer a merciful last morphine injection to Veronica. Jill and Ruby are thrilled to see their lost sister, but Gloria remains furious. (Joan wasn’t the only one whose life was derailed by Luther.)
Will Joan venture upstairs to forgive her mother, as Jill proposes, or apologize, as Gloria demands? Mendes draws out the irresolvable tension of the moment.
Designer Rob Howell divides the inn perfectly into the family’s past and present. The set rotates so that the staircase to Veronica’s room now faces the audience as Joan makes her slow, uncertain ascent. But then this travel-worn woman comes face to face with her younger self, stops dead in her tracks and turns around.
At first I assumed she was unable to absolve her mother. But she complicates this assumption when she explains to her sisters that the reason she can’t see her is “because the girl who walked up those stairs never came back down.” Is she protecting herself or protecting her mother? She’s not enraged like Gloria over events she cannot change. She accepts her scars. Her mother taught her that a song “is a place to be,” somewhere without walls, boundaries or locks, and she’s taken the advice to heart. Her life is her own ballad, free to interpret as she chooses.
What I valued most about “The Hills of California,” which intermittently erupts in nostalgic song, is that it doesn’t impose its interpretation of the characters onto the audience. The rich dramatic terrain allows us to make up our own minds about their motivations and moral actions. The theatrical portrait aspires to the complexity of life. Things happen that we never get over, yet somehow we go on, fixated or not fixated on what might have been, regretting the lyrics of our life or making the best of an imperfect tune.
