Before Jez Butterworth settles in to write a play, he will have ruminated on the idea for weeks — sometimes years. Butterworth’s impulses must gestate; he needs to explore them from every angle until they become a complete story with a beginning, middle and end, “like a dream,” he described. Only then will he expel that story onto the page. The Tony Award-winning playwright said he must feel “pregnant” with thought.. And yet, like a newborn, once Butterworth puts pen to paper to birth a play, it’s going to become what it wants. As Butterworth said, “I’ve had extreme versions of that where, for six weeks, I planned a play meticulously, sat down to start it and a week later I’d written a completely different play.”
Such was the creation of Butterworth’s latest Broadway drama, “The Hills of California,” which is currently running at Broadhurst Theatre in a limited engagement through Dec. 22. Set in a guest house in Blackpool, England (ironically named Sea View despite its lack thereof), “Hills” begins as three (of four) sisters reunite to sit vigil as their mother lies upstairs on her deathbed — waiting for their other sister to arrive. The play toggles between 1976, when the sisters are grown, and 1955, when the young quartet is aspiring to become a singing group like the Andrew Sisters, under the strict yet affectionate eye of their mother, Veronica. When Veronica makes a pivotal choice for her young girls, she ruptures the dream and the family unit and breaks her eldest, Joan.
“One of the first ideas I had this time around was that of a mother doing damage to a daughter inadvertently and it being seismic — absolutely defining — and to have the same actor play both characters,” Butterworth said. In the dual roles, he cast Tony-nominated actor Laura Donnelly (who also happens to be his wife). “The fact that it is the same actor kind of lets everybody off the hook but also puts them on it at the same time, which is where drama lives. It’s kind of compassion and accusatory all at once.”
That device then synthesized with the circumstance — communion around a deathbed — after two linked experiences in Butterworth’s life.
