Review: Long, Bumpy Ride to Sisterly Reconciliation Over ‘The Hills of California’

Shameful confession: It took Laura Donnelly’s coolly stunning entrance in The Hills of California to finally acquaint me with the lyrics to “Gimme Shelter.” I dig the Rolling Stones ghostly stomper as much as anyone, but only hazily grasped its words. The 1969 track blasts from a mysteriously reanimated jukebox as Donnelly’s Joan appears in glam-rock regalia: fur-trimmed coat, gold vest, flared blue jeans. She stalks grimly through her drab, memory-haunted childhood home after a 20-year absence. As Rob Howell’s massive set revolves around Joan, Mick Jagger brays about deadly storms and fires. In her solo, backing vocalist Merry Clayton wails, voice cracking: “Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away, just a shot away.” What does mayhem and violation have to do with a prodigal daughter’s return? By this point in the play, we have a hint.

You can never go home again? Jez Butterworth knows you never get out. The daring playwright tends to cluster his tribes in secluded, rural enclaves of birth or choice. In Jerusalem, a dissolute cult of runaways formed around Johnny “Rooster” Byron (the unforgettable Mark Rylance) in a remote forest clearing. A crowded Irish farmhouse in County Armagh was the bustling center of The Ferryman. More sparsely, a decade ago, Hugh Jackman brooded in a cabin by a stream in The River. Butterworth’s new family drama may be set in the coastal resort town of Blackpool, Lancashire (pop. ~140,000), but it might as well be the moon. The setting is a hotel called Seaview—which has zero view. Hulking staircases tilt at each other above a cluttered sitting room where three sisters wait for the death of their cancer-ravaged mother.

Seaview (we learn in flashbacks) is run by the bloody-minded disciplinarian Veronica Webb (also Donnelly), who resides there with her daughters, drilling them on close harmony and dance moves, certain they’ll become the next Andrews Sisters. Butterworth alternates scenes between 1956 and 1976, with one foursome playing the Webb girls young and another older. Hills is a working-class showbiz-dreams narrative, a portrait of hardscrabble postwar England looking hopefully to America for glamour and escape. Late on back rent, a seedy music-hall comedian (spiritual nephew of John Osborne’s Archie Rice) offers Veronica an audition for an American talent agent, and the landlady hungrily pounces. The would-be stage mother’s desperate shot at fame, though, will bring about the ruin of her children.

Butterworth writes sprawling, talky epics with ensembles in the double digits, three-hour run times, and lots of room for showy speeches. He’s fascinated by the death of dreams and the past that haunts us, the slow decay of England. Hills is not essentially different, thought it does focus on women. Men in this world—save one—are feckless husband-enablers and punching bags for Veronica and her mostly unhappy grown daughters. The one man who makes a definitive impact on the Webb household is the Yank talent scout, Luther, played by New York stage veteran David Wilson Barnes. Seeming at first a dryly reserved finder of genius (he claims to have discovered Nat King Cole), Luther reveals darker motives by requesting a private audition with 15-year-old Joan (Lara McDonnell) in “Mississippi” (Seaview’s rooms are named after American states). What makes the offstage encounter between Luther and Joan more disturbing is the suggestion that the girl initiates it—a tragic escape from her suffocating surroundings.

Barnes nearly steals his scene, but the undisputed star is Donnelly. Tossing off Butterworth’s densely allusive lines with firecracker aplomb and looking smashing in her 1950s couture (also by Howell), Donnelly makes a bid for Veronica as one of those theatrical matriarchs with passions so intense they crush their young: Medea, Amanda Wingfield, Mama Rose. “A song is a place to be,” Veronica lectures her tots, “somewhere you can live.” Joan cannot live with this provincial taskmaster and follows her own song to Hollywood. Disillusionment will follow.

Butterworth is a wonderful writer, but not a great editor. His weakness for speechifying riffs and granular detail leads to a swaggering bagginess. Sure, there’s technical prowess: In one scene, Victoria cooks for her babbling brood while quizzing them on the Andrews Sisters’ biography and managing various hotel guests coming and going. All very impressive juggling, but there’s more heat than light in the buffets of gossip and crosstalk thrown at us. The surfeit of local color tends to pull focus from what drives Veronica. Why is she obsessed with the Andrews Sisters in particular? Would she really be ignorant of Elvis Presley—who’d made a huge splash that year? Still, director Sam Mendes keeps the action driving, the design is moodily effective, and the cast overall excellent. Playing the adult sisters, there’s splendid ensemble work by Helena Wilson as the virginal homebody Jill, Ophelia Lovibond as panic-prone sweetheart Ruby and Leanne Best as perpetually dyspeptic Gloria.

In a recent interview, Butterworth says that the last acts of his plays “should be like bonfires, where all the characters are throwing their stuff onto it and watching it go up.” Indeed, the final half hour gets very hot and sparky—with the entrance of Joan for the big reckoning. Having traded her broad Lancashire vowels for a Southern California drawl and remade herself as rock hipster with no fucks to give, Joan is a deliciously ambiguous, tarnished hero, a survivor of trauma who refuses the badge of victim (and looks like she stepped out of Stereophonic). The cathartic showdown between the angry, grieving siblings leaves you more or less glad to have ridden the whole roller coaster. Almost three hours is quite an investment for the bitter irony of a woman who forced vocal harmony on her kids—only for them to end a discordant brood. But when they sing as one, you sure can picture those hills.

The Hills of California | 2hrs 45mins. One intermission. | Broadhurst Theatre | 235 West 44th Street | 212-239-6200 | Buy Tickets Here