Mama Rose is one of the most indelible characters in contemporary American theater, but she might have met her match in Veronica Webb, the ever-hustling stage mom in Jez Butterworth’s meaty new drama, The Hills of California. (The show opened Sunday at the Broadhurst Theatre, with much of the cast from the acclaimed London production.) We first meet Veronica as an offstage figure on her deathbed, a victim of stomach cancer issuing piercing screams of pain from an upstairs room in the faded rooming house she used to run in a location just a bit too far inland from the Blackpool coast to draw crowds. (The rundown set, with a series of ascending staircases suggesting a not-remotely magical Hogwarts, is designed by Rob Howell and hauntingly lit by Natasha Chivers.)
The time is 1976, and Veronica’s four grown daughters are returning to pay their final respects: the outwardly prim, cigarette-sneaking old maid Jill (Helena Wilson) has stayed close during her mother’s decline; the malleable Ruby (Ophelia Lovibond) arrives with her easily distracted husband (Bryan Dick); and then bellicose Gloria (Leanne Best) swoops in like a human tornado intent on mowing down everyone in her path, including her meek husband (Richard Short) and two teenage kids (Liam Bixby and Nancy Allsop). The fourth daughter is a wild card whose arrival the others await with a combination of admiration, resentment, resignation, and doubt: Joan, the only one to escape England, has been out of touch with the entire family since settling in California decades ago for a music career they all presume has been wildly successful despite scant evidence. And much of the conversation centers on this Godot-like figure and the hold her long-ago presence and prolonged absence have had on all of them.
The reason for that estrangement is the central mystery of Butterworth’s well-crafted but somewhat schematic play, which stretches over three hours (with two intermissions) and includes an inflated cast of 17 (several playing multiple roles) and many a meandering narrative detour. With a spin of that spell-binding turntable set, the scenes shift between 1976 and 1955 — when we see Veronica (Laura Donnelly) as a savvy but frustrated middle-aged widow, stuck running a second-rate guest house that she erroneously dubs the Seaview while diligently grooming her girls into becoming a younger English version of the Andrews Sisters. That choice of verb is apt — as will become clear with the arrival of an unscrupulous American talent agent (David Wilson Barnes) who agrees to audition the girls for the big time.
While Veronica’s ambition is just as copious as Mama Rose’s — her maternal advice runs along the lines of “The road ahead is a bumpy one. It’s not for the fainthearted, the uncommitted, the weak or the wheezy” — she’s clear-eyed enough to see how the odds are stacked against her and her brood. She also recognizes that while middle daughter Gloria (Nancy Allsop) lacks the talent and the temperament to go very far in showbiz, the eldest, Joan, is a star in the making (Lara McDonnell radiates that It quality, which might be just as easily chalked up to oldest-sister bravado). What Veronica fails to realize is that even by the 1950s, there’s no longer an audience for the tight harmonies of WWII-era classics like “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” performed by the girls in USO-ready fringe dresses with tap-dance breaks and ukulele accompaniment. “Have you heard of Elvis Presley?” the agent pointedly asks her, to which she can only reply: “I’m sorry. I don’t know what that is.”
Before long, Veronica makes a decision whose consequences, we can see in her face, she suspects all too well but that she seems powerless to stop. (Butterworth, alas, does not allow her to deliver a dramatic “Rose’s Turn” monologue of her own where she truly reckons with this fateful choice.)
Sam Mendes, who previously directed Butterworth’s sprawling Irish-set drama The Ferryman, does a masterful job at regulating the ebbs and flows between the two time periods — and the cast is note-perfect, particularly in executing the song-and-dance routines that produced so many core memories for these somewhat fractious sisters. The standout performer is Donnelly, a Butterworth veteran (and real-life partner). The actress mesmerizes both as Veronica and, in the final scene, as a very ’70s Californified Joan — who does indeed return to her childhood home with trepidation as well as soul-bearing honesty.
All the old bitterness and jealousy and misunderstandings burst into the open, but Joan absorbs them with a kind of zoned-out equanimity. In the process, Butterworth cannily invites us to question some of the basic premises of the memory play as a form. “People remember things differently don’t they?” the dutiful Jillian says early on. “And sometimes people forget things. Things they don’t want to remember.”
Butterworth also drives home the point that memory is necessarily subjective — our recollection of events must be filtered through our own personal experience, however blinkered by our age or position or biases. We each get to shape our own memories, to make ourselves the heroes or the villains as we please. Music, however, can unify even disparate souls and serve as a kind of cognitive Elmer’s glue. Despite their distance, both physical and emotional, when they open their mouths in song the Webb sisters find themselves slipping back into the same, familiar harmonies. In the end, The Hills of California seems to suggest, music offers the possibility of reconnecting to a feeling that’s almost like home.
THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA
Broadhurst Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes (1 intermission, 2-minute pause before Act 3)
Tickets on sale through Dec. 22
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