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Is there a more dependable set-up for family drama than the gathering of long-estranged siblings? Last season’s dark and wonderful Appropriate proved there was plenty of life in Pinter’s old Homecoming trick, and this Broadway season Jez Butterworth does it again with the fine The Hills Of California, a superbly performed reckoning with old traumas and those family squabbles that can seem so petty on the surface.
Of course, longstanding squabbles usually turn out to be not so petty after all, at least once they’ve been eviscerated for all to see. And Butterworth, along with his uncannily simpatico director Sam Mendes, does expert work on the evisceration front, doling out tidbits of decades-old family resentments until just the right moments for the cutting open. We might guess what drove the once-close four sisters of The Hills Of California apart for so many years, and maybe even why some, not all, have shut their now-dying mom out of their lives for so long. But the revelations come hard, just the same.
First of all, that title. Not a moment of Butterworth’s play takes place in California: The title is lifted from a 1948 Johnny Mercer song that was old and dated even in 1955 when four young sisters in Blackpool, England, practice the song again and again, along with plenty of Andrews Sisters tunes, in what they – and especially their Mama Rose-type mother Veronica – are sure will offer a ticket out of an oppressive, dead-end life living in (and operating) a third-rate guesthouse near the ocean. The place is called Seaview, despite not having one – this is a family accustomed to lies.
We first meet the adult sisters (or, initially, most of them) in 1976, when the Seaview has added a few tacky touches over the years – a broken down jukebox, a tiki-style bar – to seem somewhat less stuck in the amber of Britain’s post-War doldrums (Rob Howell designed the detail-perfect set). First there’s Jill (Helena Wilson), the seemingly mousy one who has remained cooped up with mom decades after the others have bolted. Jill has sacrificed a life of her own – she’s a 32-year-old virgin, she announces at one point – to keep their embittered mother Veronica company, particularly in the more recent cancer-riddled years. And just recently, the dying old woman made a deathbed confession that only Jill was there to hear. More of that later.
Also gathering – we never see the mother in old age, by the way, but even as she’s upstairs dying her presence is no less heavy on the downstairs activity – are Ruby (Ophelia Lovibond) and Gloria (Leanne Best), both with husbands and children of their own, to varying degrees of dissatisfaction. Gloria, the second eldest, seems the most unhappy to be back home, bitter and angry and cold-hearted for reasons that make themselves clear when the talk turns to the absent Joan, the eldest and most talented of the singing siblings who broke up the quartet when she abandoned the family at 15 for the promise of solo stardom in California.
If stardom remained elusive for the beautiful and talented Joan, we can easily imagine what she did, in fact, find in its place: a musical career on the fringes of L.A.’s rock and roll scene of the ’60s and ’70s, perhaps singing backup to real stars here and there, getting gigs on the road, maybe, as rumor has it, sharing in the heroin addictions of her more successful associates. In any case, most of the sisters don’t really expect Joan to show up for mom’s going-away…until she does.
Joan’s big Act III entrance is a doozy: she arrives after the others have gone to bed, bedecked in a long fuzzy-trimmed coat that could be a Stevie Nicks hand-me-down (costumes by Howell, as good as his set), drifting unnoticed into the Seaview with only the broken jukebox taking notice by suddenly springing to life and filling the dead air with the Rollings Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” (what would a Butterworth play be without at least a little hint of spooky magic).
Prior to Act III, we’ve seen Joan only in her 1955 adolescence via the vivid flashback scenes that make up the flesh and bones of this compelling family dynamic.
In those flashbacks, the four girls, aged 12 to 15, routinely gather in the kitchen under their mother Veronica’s stern eye to practice their Andrews Sisters act that all, most especially Veronica, is sure will be the family’s ticket out of the Blackpool backwater (dad is long gone, and with various dead war hero stories made up by Veronica to suit her whims; more likely the girls were just the result of mom’s wartime hook-ups).
And here’s the thing: The girls’ act is good. They can sing beautifully, and they’re cute as buttons. Unlike Mama Rose, Veronica is not completely delusional in her dreams for stardom. But she is hopelessly out of date, stuck in her war years heyday: When an honest-to-god music executive comes to hear them sing – a visit arranged by family friend and Seaview lodger – the expert sees what we do and what Veronica can’t: swing is out, Elvis is ascendant, and the girls’ act is hopeless.
And then comes the devil’s bargain: Dismissing the girls from the room, Luther St. John (David Wilson Barnes) the manager of Perry Como no less, offers mom a Sophie’s Choice: Would she allow her eldest, the beautiful, blossoming Joan, to strike out on her own musical road to stardom? And would mom allow Joan to give him a private audition in one of the bedrooms upstairs?
What happens next is hard to stomach, even though the horror occurs offstage. The family will splinter, some know the truth, no one will ever be the same. Needless to say, that 1976 reunion, with mom dying upstairs, will give rise to a ton of unpacking.
Even if some of the sisters’ long-held grievances pale when compared to the others – discrepancies that dampen the drama – Butterworth (The Ferryman, Jerusalem) and Mendes have been blessed with a cast that knows exactly how to unpack them, one memento, one memory, one newly rediscovered emotion at a time. Both sets of siblings are first-rate (the younger versions are impeccably played by Nancy Allsop, Sophia Ally, Lara McDonnell and Nicola Turner). Richard Short, Bryan Dick and Richard Lumsden do excellent work playing the various men in the women’s orbit, most hapless sorts doing their best to stay afloat in the turbulence, while Ta’Rea Campbell is all calm reason as a hospice nurse.
Laura Donnelly plays both the thirtysomething Joan and, in the flashbacks, mother Veronica. It’s an astonishing dual performance. As the would-be, maybe nearly-was rock star Joan, Donnelly pitches her voice to a cigarette-stained California hippie burnout with only a hint of the Blackpool roots she so clearly has worked mightily to eradicate. As Veronica, Donnelly is a stage mother wannabe with arguably good intentions, a smart, talented woman smothered by the times and desperate to give her daughters the opportunities she never had. Equal parts Mama Rose, Miss Jean Brodie, Amanda Wingfield and Sophie Zawistowska, Veronica is a monster for an instantly regretted minute, and she and those she loves will pay for that lapse the rest of their lives.
If The Hills Of California has a lesson to impart, that’s it: Watch out for those damned minutes when being a monster seems like a reasonable option – they’re rarely reasonable, and almost never just minutes.
Title: The Hills Of California
Venue: Broadway’s Broadhurst Theater
Written By: Jez Butterworth
Directed By: Sam Mendes
Cast: Laura Donnelly, Leanne Best, Ophelia Lovibond, Helena Wilson; Nancy Allsop; Sophia Ally; Lara McDonnell; Nicola Turner, David Wilson Barnes, Ta’Rea Campbell, Bryan Dick, Richard Lumsden, Richard Short, Liam Bixby, Ellyn Heald, Max Roll, and Cameron Scoggins
Running time: 2 hr 45 min (including one intermission and one pause)
