Doing Less With More: The Hills of California

theater review

Sept. 29, 2024

Doing Less With More: The Hills of California

By
Sara Holdren,
a theater director and a critic at New York magazine and Vulture.

From The Hills of California, at the Broadhurst Theatre.
Photo: Joan Marcus

The last time Jez Butterworth and Sam Mendes rode into Broadway on the back of a big-boned new play, smothered in five-star reviews and Olivier awards, there were geese, and babies, and bunnies. This time, there’s no livestock, only a broken jukebox and an out-of-tune piano in an old guesthouse in the north of England — a place called Seaview where there is no sea view. Whereas The Ferryman had death in its name yet packed the stage with warm-blooded life—animals and children, drink and dance and harvest festivities—The Hills of California, acts as its reverse image. The title, taken from the Johnny Mercer tune, is all glowing, crooning mid-century dreaminess, a life of sunny days and glamorous blue Pacific nights. But those hills are as distant and untouchable as the horizon, and the play they loom over is heavy with death. The result is that Butterworth—who puts plays together like machines, calibrated for passion or pathos at the pull of a certain lever—has less to hide behind. The sheer exuberant maximalism of The Ferryman went a long way toward obscuring, even at times absolving, the show’s overdependence on some pretty trite types and twists. In The Hills of California, Butterworth’s calculations are exposed. He’s cooking with the same stock, but the soup has gotten unappetizingly thin.

The tricky thing about this kind of craftsmanship is that it turns a play into a set: It looks solid and handsomely decorated, it’s shaped like a house and even comes pretty close to feeling like a house, but the backs of its walls are just so many unpainted flats and sandbags. It has the shape of profundity, but too often the shape only, and while it’s meant to provoke heartfelt gasps and nods, even tears at precisely engineered moments, it can leave you feeling like Ben Stiller in Mystery Men. Mendes’s directorial brain seems stuck in Hollywood these days, and his approach to Hills is shockingly lazy: When characters reach big, important speeches, they turn downstage and deliver them straight out to that misty spot above the audience’s heads. Emotional sequences are underscored by similar strains of brooding music, the show’s Official Pensive Moment refrain, from composer Nick Powell; and between the play’s second and third acts (there’s already been an intermission after Act One), Mendes can think of nothing better to do than to bring the house lights halfway up for a couple of minutes while stagehands wander on to move props and the audience’s attention wanders with them. He pulled this exact same lack-of-trick in The Ferryman, and he got an Oliver and a Tony for it. That’s unacceptable. Do something with the stage. Build a transition, for Dionysus’s sake.

Mendes’s blasé direction and Butterworth’s overripe dramatics are doubly frustrating because they’re weighing down a bunch of fine actresses, turning what might be (and what will surely be called) a great play for women into a slice of formulaic melo-trauma. Hills is aiming for a kind of Gypsy-meets-Chekhov-in-Blackpool—it’s possibly not the luckiest coincidence that it arrives in New York just before Audra’s Mama Rose—and in scenic designer Rob Howell’s rendering of Seaview, a turntable rotates to show us two eras. When we’re in the “public parlor,” complete with dilapidated tiki bar and sad Formica tea tables, it’s 1976. Spin to the kitchen, or “the private parlor,” as the formidable lady of the house calls it, and it’s 1955. That lady is Veronica Webb (Laura Donnelly), red-lipped and cinch-waisted, as coiffed and charismatic as Gene Tierney, and determined that her four daughters are going to be stars. She’s trained them into a singing group à la the Andrews Sisters, and they’ve grown up in awe of both her strict discipline and her grand visions for their future. There’s naïve Jill (Nicola Turner and then, in adulthood, Helena Wilson), excitable Ruby (Sophia Ally and Ophelia Lovibond), and fretful Gloria (Nancy Allsop and Leanne Best); and then—played by Lara McDonnell as a teen and by Donnelly in a pointed piece of double-casting as an adult—there’s Joan.

“Joan’s mum’s favorite,” Wilson’s Jill tells a visiting nurse named Penny (Ta’Rea Campbell). “Not favorite… Mum always used to say. Gloria’s Gran, you’re your dad, Ruby’s Ruby. But Joan is me.” In 1976, Jill haunts the public parlor like a glum ghost, no longer a sweet little kid but an an antsy, mousy 32-year-old with a secret cigarette habit. She’s the carer, the one who’s stuck around, and upstairs her dynamo of a mother is dying. Gloria and Ruby arrive soon enough, dragging husbands and humdrum lives from elsewhere in Britain, but Joan is the real phantom — no one in the family has seen her for twenty years. She’s in America, the sunny dreamland, where her sisters imagine she’s pursuing a real music career. But she’ll “be here,” Jill insists. “It’s imperative.”

Butterworth neatly sets up various pins of mystery and misery so that he can knock them down when the time is right: Why did Joan disappear? Why is older Gloria burning with vitriol for the sister she once loved and looked up to, the sister who let her share a contraband cigarette and assured her she was “hip as fuck” when she was a sweaty, nervous kid? What stopped the Webb Sisters from pursuing musical glory? And why does Veronica seem as riddled with guilt as with cancer? It’s not hard to see the answers to plenty of this stuff coming — even when they’re shocking in shape, they’re not revelatory. They slot into place and keep the machine churning without really making us feel — a weird irony, given how much heavy feeling there is up onstage. Wilson, Lovibond, Best, and Donnelly are all strong actors, but Butterworth and Mendes’s broad strokes have a tendency to render them shrewish (Best’s Gloria), inconsistent (Lovibond’s Ruby, whose amorphous character shifts to do whatever Butterworth needs it to do in a given moment), or even flat-out wooden: Although Donnelly nails Veronica’s manicured blend of tenacity and desperation, her return in the show’s third act as Joan is little more than a caricature. In she slouches, with hair like the Runaways and Penny Lane’s jacket from Almost Famous. She chain-smokes and talks in an unvarying dull vocal fry. She is disillusionment embodied, a fatuous cartoon of American worldliness.

This nuance-free deadpan isn’t just grating to listen to; it entirely obscures the character’s humanity, robbing the play’s final movement of whatever catharsis it might have. It leaves us with only two possible interpretations, neither good. Either Mendes and Donnelly have wildly miscalculated an acting choice, or they’ve really decided that childhood trauma and rock-and-roll living have reduced the character to a hip, hardened husk. But if that’s the case, whence Joan’s insistence that life is random, as full of beauty as suffering? (“The donkey takes a dump. Roses grow,” she declaims more than once — again, it’s shaped like a meaningful thought.) And whence the rays of golden dawn that start to creep in through Seaview’s windows after the sisters’ long dark night of the soul? “It’s warm out,” says Penny, arriving in the wee hours, “and the sun’s barely in the sky… It’s going to be another lovely day.” Poor Penny — the dependable Black woman in a house of white ladies rehashing their childhood wounds. In both time periods, Campbell plays the help: the nurse in 1976 and, in 1955, a maid actually named Biddy. She’s the kind of character who appears to have nothing but enthusiasm for working for the ladies of Seaview. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Webb,” she says, promising Veronica that she won’t let anyone disrupt an audition that the girls are doing for a big-time American agent (David Wilson Barnes as a cool, cruel customer). “I’ll guard that door with my life.”

Whatever 1955 might “really” have looked like, no American playwright in their right mind would write a role like Penny/Biddy now. And no playwright and director without vast resources would add multiple actors to an already huge ensemble only to use them in one tiny scene each (Max Roll, Ellyn Heald, and Cameron Scoggins all flash by in roles that could easily have been doubled, like plenty of other parts in the cast). But in The Hills of California, all this is part and parcel with a general reliance on old building blocks and underinterrogated gestures. Although the singing by both sets of Webb Sisters is tuneful and sweet, and there are the seeds of something more truly affecting in their story, the world they’re inhabiting is a kind of trompe-l’œil illusion. If, as Veronica instills in her girls, “a song is a place to be … somewhere you can live,” then so too is a play. But you can’t live in a façade. One strong push and the wall comes down.

The Hills of California is at the Broadhurst Theatre through December 22.

Doing Less With More: The Hills of California