Many months ago, when the British playwright Jez Butterworth was starting to ponder the subject for his next work, he was watching a spider build a web in the doorway of his farmhouse in Devon. The sun illuminated each delicate strand as the arachnid labored. “And it didn’t know,” he tells me, “that my dog was going to come running through that doorway from his walk and just smash the whole thing to shit.”
That idea—of investing heart and soul in something precarious and fragile, only to have it carelessly destroyed—stayed with the playwright as he began writing The Hills of California, which opens at Broadway’s Broadhurst this month after a run on London’s West End. Hills is the story of a mother, Veronica, and the four daughters she is raising by herself in 1950s Blackpool, a seaside resort town in Lancashire that was once something like the Atlantic City of England—a place for frothy diversions and bad behavior. Veronica and her daughters live in and run the Sea View Guesthouse (no seaside visible), where the quarters are named Minnesota, Indiana, Alabama, and so on; Blackpool may have a boardwalk, but the dream is on the other side of the ocean. “The hills of California will give you a start,” sings Johnny Mercer in the classic American standard—part of the girls’ choreographed act. “I guess I better warn ya, ’cause you’ll lose your heart.”
Veronica is painstakingly cultivating her daughters as a quartet in the mold of the Andrews Sisters, the harmonizing group from Minneapolis that rose from humble beginnings in the 1930s and ’40s to help define the sound of the boogie-woogie era. The hammy bops that propelled the group to fame are on the way out, but Veronica is unaware and undaunted. “Have you heard of Elvis Presley?” asks a talent scout type who shows up to assess the girls. “I don’t know what that is,” she replies.
This is the “before” of the play, but Hills of California actually opens in the “after,” about 20 years later, in 1976. The girls are grown, and Veronica, an unseen presence in the towering, multistory boarding house, is dying, upstairs and offstage. The youngest sister, Jillian—dutiful and made a little timid by the small scope of her life—has never left home, while the two middle sisters (Gloria and Ruby) are heading to their mother’s deathbed with various degrees of dread. Joan, the oldest sister, has been gone for years—she actually did make it to America, though the more you learn of her journey the less triumphant it seems.
The play flips—literally, the set rotates to indicate temporal shifts—between the two eras: the before, a time of youth, possibility, and ambition; and the after, with its dashed dreams and unfulfilled promises. If this all seems a rather bleak agenda, anyone familiar with Butterworth’s writing will know that the play doesn’t occupy one register for long. Like all of his plays (this is his eighth; his most recent, The Ferryman, won the 2019 Tony for best play, among other honors), it traverses broad and fertile terrain: the unpredictability of cultural changes, the relationship between parents and offspring, the force of ambition, the sense of time running out.
“He’s kind of a rock star, Jez is,” says the play’s Broadway director, Sam Mendes, who shepherded the West End production of Hills earlier this year. Mendes was a few years ahead of Butterworth at Cambridge University and followed the playwright’s early career with admiration and a dose of healthy jealousy. “He sort of breezed onto the scene in a really effortless way, but didn’t seem to be an intellectual or wannabe. There seemed to be something raw about him,” Mendes says. “And there still is.” The two have become collaborators (Mendes also directed The Ferryman) and friends; they used to have seats next to each other at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, and Mendes first became aware of the new play when Butterworth came to his house to watch a match. “My wife, Ali, said, ‘What’s that at the bottom of the coat closet covered in coffee stains?’ ” Mendes recalls. “And he was like, ‘Oh yeah, I brought that for Sam.’ ” Butterworth told him it was his new play, that he should have a look. “I was like, Fuck, I’ll read that. It wasn’t the act of a friend. It was because I wanted to know what Jez Butterworth was writing next.”