Grief is a difficult thing. While traditionally ascribed to mourning, grief permeates our lives in a variety of ways for a multitude of reasons—be it the loss of a person, an object, or even an intangible dream or belief. To have wants and desires is also to grieve, because it is impossible to truly gain without the risk of loss.
In Jez Butterworth’s The Hills of California, a West End transfer now playing Broadway’s Broadhurst Theatre in a limited engagement through December 22, silenced grief bursts forth with an almighty roar as four sisters return to their childhood home to await their mothers imminent death. Haunted by dreams deferred, unrealized potential, and more than a few family secrets, the play is yet another opus from Butterworth, responsible for 2019 Best Play Tony winner The Ferryman.
Butterworth has been working on this play, in one form or another, since 2012, after the protracted loss of his sister Joanna. “My plays stay in me for enormous, long periods of time,” Butterworth explains from his home writing nook. “The longest one that I've got cooking away is now 26 years in the making, and it is still not quite ready. Arthur Miller said that ‘a play has to pass behind your eyeballs for you to see it.’ And an idea can be in there for years before you see it clearly. This play has been in me since my sister died, and we gathered as a family at her deathbed. It was a process that went on for about six months, because she was living in a cottage on my farm while dying of brain cancer. I became very familiar with the tones and the cadences around impending loss, and it started to fascinate me how different people reacted in different ways.”
One of five siblings, Butterworth’s grief was mirrored by those around him. Soon, he couldn’t help but bear witness to the sadness weighing upon almost everyone in his orbit, in one way or another.
“The play sat dormant inside me until I attended a funeral of a friend's mother,” Butterworth recalls. “He was one of three brothers, and on the day of the funeral, they were all responding in completely different ways, as if they had three different mothers and three completely different experiences. And then, when we were at the graveside, I watched one of them walk away from the grave, around to the other side of the church. I went off to see him, and he was just sitting there, looking out over the fields, as they interred her into the ground. The whole play landed in my head the moment I saw him.”
Set in Blackpool (England’s answer to America’s Atlantic City), the interpersonal conflicts of The Hills of California are interwoven with the entertainment hub’s own collapse; when the Webb sisters were a young family singing troupe, patterned after the Andrews Sisters, Blackpool was the bustling center of entertainment on the English coast. But by the 1970s, attentions had turned abroad, leaving the city and the girls to pick up the pieces of the shattered footlights.
“To me, Jez is one of the great contemporary playwrights,” director Sam Mendes enthuses. “I've known Jez for 20, 30 years now, and whatever he writes, I love to do. In some ways, this process recaptures what I loved about The Ferryman; it’s sense of detail and texture and life is so clear, and in some ways more challenging, because this play operates on two timescales rather than one. And it has music and dance and other elements that make it feel more kaleidoscopic.”
While Butterworth’s original inspiration came from grief experienced within a brotherhood, it didn’t take long for him to transpose the topic onto a group of sisters. “I've got four daughters, and for the last decade, most of my time has been spent around women. I’m not joking when I say it's a rare day that I speak to a man. I often find myself in rooms where I'm the only man. It seems that women quite quickly forget that you're there,” Butterworth laughs. “And I found that there's a whole different way that they communicate with one another, when the room is not half stacked with guys. I find that communication really fascinating and joyful and just full of light and heat.”
Like any good family drama, the darkness of The Hills of California is tempered by true humor; as the show tracks the shifting pop culture landscape, Butterworth weaves in plenty of touchstones, including a resonant needle drop of The Rolling Stones’ classic “Gimme Shelter” that is sure to summon goosebumps as Mendes unfolds the shows rotating set to supreme effect.
“These are huge, pivotal moments in these characters' lives, and it’s my job as a director to make them feel alive with surprise,” Mendes details. “Every character, and every actor requires something different at that moment. Some people struggle more than others. Some people are alive every second and every moment, and some people are only beginning to wake up.”
“This is a play about grief, but it's extremely funny,” Mendes adds, enthused. “It's full of life. It's full of laughter, music and strangeness. One of the reasons it casts such an unusual spell is because it proceeds in such an unconventional way, both in terms of its narrative and the way the characters behave with each other. And yet, there are no bum notes. And that's the skill of the writer. I couldn't tell you how he does that, because for me, it's like a magic trick. When I’m working with Jez, my job is to bring to life those magical things, even if they are still a mystery to me, in many ways. It’s like, I don't understand how A Streetcar Named Desire works, really, but I know it has an effect on me whenever I see it. People have this impotent belief that unpicking and somehow dismantling art can take you closer to why it's good. But really, at the end of the day, I'm not sure it does. There's a core of mystery in every great piece of art. It's not just as simple as two plus two equals four. There's an element of magic.”
The act of creating such magical work certainly affected Butterworth, who enters something of a fugue state during the writing process.
“There's whole bits of it where I was just hanging on for dear life,” Butterworth laughs. “I was constantly trying to keep up with what I was seeing behind my eyes. When I wrote this play, I was imagining it happening in three: in real life, on a stage, and from the perspective of being in the audience. But it was also like it was all happening in a dream, when you can see all of those perspectives at once.”
While much of the play appeared to him in that hazy dreamscape, the show's West End run offered him the clarity he needed to realize the ending was not right. The Broadway transfer has allowed him to make an all-important change (a spoiler abounds here).
“There’s a couple of little changes we made, like changing Polos to Tic Tacs, but the real change is the ending," says Butterworth. "When I hand my plays to the director, I hand them over with a head, two arms, a body and three legs. And each one of the legs is lovely, but we have to decide which one we don’t need. When we took the play to the West End, it went out there with three legs, and I knew I needed to reshape the final moves in the play in a way that I found more satisfying, the way that you might adjust the last stanza of a poem.”
On Broadway, the eldest of the sisters, Joan (played by Laura Donnelly, who was Olivier-nominated for her performance), has been completely transformed in the rewrites: gone are her neglected husband and child, and her life on the road with The Rolling Stones. Instead, Butterworth has honed in on the soul-scarring grief that comes from the abandonment of one's supposed potential.
“There is something at the heart of this play about the idea of really, really wanting to be special. And the folly of that. You can live through what we call ‘the 60s’ and completely miss out on being a hippie or a punk, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t live,” Butterworth states, his voice warm. “You don’t have to be special to be worth remembering.”
Ta’Rea Campbell and Helena Wilson in The Hills of California
Leanne Best, Ophelia Lovibond, Helena Wilson, and Laura Donnelly in The Hills of California
Helena Wilson, Laura Donnelly, and Ophelia Lovibond in The Hills of California
Laura Donnelly in The Hills of California
Richard Short and Bryan Dick in The Hills of California
Nancy Allsop, Nicola Turner, Laura Donnelly,
Lara McDonnell, and Sophia Ally in The Hills of California
Helena Wilson and Ophelia Lovibond in The Hills of California
Nicola Turner, Nancy Allsop, Sophia Ally, and Lara McDonnell in The Hills of California
Helena Wilson in The Hills of California
Leanne Best and Richard Short in The Hills of California
Ophelia Lovibond in The Hills of California
Laura Donnelly in The Hills of California
David Wilson Barnes, Lara McDonnell, and Laura Donnelly in The Hills of California
Nancy Allsop, Nicola Turner, Sophia Ally, and Lara McDonnell in The Hills of California
Lara McDonnell, Nancy Allsop, and Sophia Ally in The Hills of California
Laura Donnelly and Lara McDonnell in The Hills of California
Nicola Turner, Nancy Allsop, Lara McDonnell, Sophia Ally, Laura Donnelly, and Richard Lumsden in The Hills of California
Lara McDonnell, Laura Donnelly, and Sophia Ally in The Hills of California
Leanne Best in The Hills of California
