The setting for “The Hills of California,” Jez Butterworth’s often comic, secretly heartsick drama, now at the Broadhurst, is an unfashionable guesthouse in the seaside resort town of Blackpool, in the North of England. Do not go in expecting a hill, or the sunny American West: the title comes from a Johnny Mercer song, which we hear during the play, in assorted wistful strains. (“The hills of California are somethin’ to see / the sun will kinda warm ya—” the song promises ambivalently.) The astonishing Laura Donnelly, who starred in Butterworth’s Tony Award-winning tragedy, “The Ferryman,” plays the guesthouse’s owner, Veronica Webb, a martinet we meet issuing orders to her four teen-age daughters in the nineteen-fifties. Veronica is a mum on a mission: she’s determined to launch her daughters as a close-harmony act, a note-for-note imitation of the Andrews Sisters—a reference that she doesn’t realize may be sliding out of date.
Butterworth does not disguise that “Hills” echoes Arthur Laurents’s musical “Gypsy”—in “Hills,” the hard-charging stage mother’s favorite and most gifted child is fifteen-year-old Joan (Lara McDonnell), just a vowel shift away from June, one of the child-actor siblings in “Gypsy.” But Butterworth, among our most sophisticated structuralists, also builds a complicated temporal armature for the familiar tale of a deluded, fame-hungry stage mother. We see the characters in two eras, played by two groups of actors: in 1955, as tap-dancing, ditty-crooning adolescents, and in 1976, as adults, when they come home to Blackpool to see their mother on her deathbed.
Butterworth is preoccupied with doubles, particularly the kind of copy that has the power to sap its original. (“I feel like someone xeroxed me across the planet,” one of the sisters drawls, weary after a trip.) The grownups are bitter—and bitterly funny—mimeographs of their brighter young selves: shy Jillian (Helena Wilson) never left home; Ruby (Ophelia Lovibond) scarcely uses her thrilling, throaty singing voice and sort of despises her sad-sack husband, Dennis (Bryan Dick). “You know if Dennis were to walk out of here and become a missing person, and I had to describe him to the police, I genuinely wouldn’t know where to start,” she cracks. Vicious Gloria (Leanne Best, in stunning dragon mode) has an even sadder, sackier husband, Bill (Richard Short). Joan, the only one who went into show biz, is mostly a glamorous absence: she left after a mysterious family rupture, and she’s supposed to be flying in from California for her first visit in twenty years. The sisters wait for her, as they mostly avoid their dying, now alcoholic mother, who remains upstairs, out of sight. Gloria, having looked in on Veronica’s sickroom, describes her, horrifyingly, as a “skull with a rag hanging out of it.”
Time flows back and forth. Via a revolving set, we alternate between the guesthouse’s two sides—the family’s private kitchen and the public front room—and the soda-pop fifties and the acidic seventies. How much of what the sisters say is accurate? Memory is another bad copy. A lecherous old piano tuner (Richard Lumsden), one of several goatish men, reminisces about a rather different Veronica than the bluff and bustling woman we keep meeting over her own kitchen table. During the adult sisters’ overnight deathwatch, it’s hellishly hot in the un-air-conditioned rooming house. To emphasize the purgatorial atmosphere, the director Sam Mendes, who also directed “The Ferryman,” uses the composer Nick Powell’s eerie underscoring, and the set designer Rob Howell creates a stack of Escheresque staircases, which zigzag uncannily above the first-floor rooms. When Joan finally does return home, her adult self is played by a much transformed Donnelly; Joan is Veronica’s warped reflection. Even the town’s name—Blackpool—suggests looking into a dark mirror.
For “The Ferryman,” Butterworth adapted an incident from Donnelly’s own Northern Irish family’s experience in the Troubles. At the beginning of that play, her character has spent a decade as a sort of half widow; her husband, who had disappeared ten years earlier, has finally been found, mummified in a peat bog. In “The Hills,” Donnelly again plays a maybe-widow: Veronica tells people, variously, that her husband’s naval destroyer was torpedoed, that he died on the beach at Normandy, or that he was lost at El Alamein. Butterworth and Donnelly are partners in life, and he seems to like marrying her fictional versions to phantoms—but he’s also mining a vein here, of family secrecy and suspended rot.
Donnelly’s particular strength is in seeming at once vulnerable and absolutely terrifying, while speaking a mile a minute; in the play’s best scenes, Butterworth pushes Veronica’s tempo to its maximum. At one point, she even outtalks a laddish motormouth comedian, a tenant (Bryan Dick, again) who owes her rent. Despite all the showboating badinage—characters throw jokes and local references out so quickly that you miss the first just in time to be run over by the next—this play isn’t Butterworth’s finest writing. For one thing, it’s a drama in search of an ending. I saw “Hills” in London earlier this year, when it had an overstuffed third act. Though this streamlined version is more muscular, some of the playwright’s cuts have unbalanced his structure: the main dramatic pivot rests on the show’s wobbliest scene, and grownup Joan’s late-play entrance cues a series of diminishing returns. Still, Butterworth and Mendes display a wonderful theatrical intelligence throughout, particularly in the little showstoppers—musical performances, or arias of insult—that punctuate the night. And craft is always a comfort, right? Veronica does badly in many ways by her girls, particularly Joan, but the sisters do learn harmony. Even toward the end, they’re still finely dovetailing their voices in an aural herringbone, modulating beautifully as their lives fall out of tune.
Speaking of doppelgängers, David Henry Hwang’s postmodern comedy “Yellow Face,” from 2007, has come, at last, to the Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre, nearly twenty years after its Off Broadway première, at the Public. Even now, Hwang’s interweaving of fact and invention feels audacious and fresh: he draws from the record while also sneaking in plenty of fictional mayhem.
Daniel Dae Kim informs the audience that he is DHH, a playwright famous for writing the breakthrough Broadway hit “M. Butterfly” and for leading protests against cross-racial casting in “Miss Saigon,” which notoriously featured a white actor in a “Eurasian role.” That’s all true of the real David Henry Hwang. But, according to this play, history then repeats as farce: in his follow-up to “M. Butterfly,” DHH accidentally casts a white guy, Marcus (Ryan Eggold), as his Asian leading man, and he has to scramble to cover up the gaffe.
Hwang, like Butterworth, is interested in doubles—truth and falsehood, yes, but other pairings, too. The real drama of “Yellow Face” lies with DHH’s optimistic father, Henry (Francis Jue), who makes hilarious calls from California: he keeps volunteering DHH to get people tickets to the problematic “Miss Saigon,” and rhapsodizing about the American promise of transformation. “So beautiful!” Henry sighs, about basically everything. Meanwhile, DHH confronts a Times reporter (Greg Keller) over racist portraits of Chinese Americans in the media, the kind of warped mirroring that can do real harm.
Leigh Silverman directs a rigorously unspectacular production, with an almost dogmatic refusal to add any Broadway razzle. The dazzle, therefore, is reserved for the actors. The ensemble, particularly Kevin Del Aguila, makes all kinds of mischief, and Kim excels at seeming harried. But it’s Jue who walks off with the show. He is most moving during a speech in which Henry remembers being a frustrated “second son” in China and watching American movies. “All those movie stars—Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable and Frank Sinatra—they were the real me,” Henry says, wistfully and a little proudly. Sometimes illusions aren’t poisonous, he suggests. The hills of California are somethin’ to see. ♦
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