Director Sam Mendes and playwright Jez Butterworth were friends for 30 years before they got around to collaborating. The result, The Ferryman, won them both 2017 Olivier Awards in England and 2018 Tony Awards here. Their sequel, The Hills of California, bodes even better.
“I do, unconditionally, love Jez’s writing—even in his minor plays,” Mendes tells Observer. “I love the worlds that he inhabits, the way he tells stories. We had a great experience doing The Ferryman, and I told him, ‘Listen, when you write your next play, please send it to me.”
Butterworth did just that—in installments. “He sent me Act I,” says Mendes, who suggested a reading of the work in progress. “Because I know his hearing the readings gets him to carrying on with the writing. Straightaway, it was just magic.” The story was set in Blackpool, England, where four teenaged sisters are pushed by their mother to replicate the sound of the Andrews Sisters, and that first act unfolded in both 1955 and 1976, so some of the same characters appeared as their younger and older selves. “I liked the fact that, for the first time, he was making a play that existed on two timescales and not just in one room,” says Mendes. “It was two parts of the play, talking to each other.”
Mendes liked it so much, in fact, that he was on board as director from the moment of the reading of that first act. “I said, ‘Yeah, I’m in. I’d like to direct this when you finish it,’” he remembers. “I think that—plus the readings—got him going. He wrote the second act, and we did another reading, then another act and another reading.” He and Butterworth cast the play as they went, so by the time they’d finished the third reading, most of the roles were set. “We did that with The Ferryman, too. It’s a great way to cast a show because you can see the chemistry between people. You’re not just casting individuals. You’re casting a group, a family.”
The Hills of California opened first in London earlier this year, in January. A few of the original cast members were unable to be in the Broadway production, but those who play the four sisters—both as teenagers and adults—were. “So the core of eight women is the same,” says Mendes. “And that’s the center of the play.”
Seventeen actors are required to cover the 18 characters in Hills. The star—Laura Donnelly, whose true family story inspired Butterworth to write The Ferryman and who is now Mrs. Butterworth—drew the double duty. Though more than that, actually: Butterworth decided, before he brought the play to Broadway, he would do a major rewrite on one of the two characters she plays, revising and (all say) “improving” what London’s West End saw. Which meant his wife had quite a lot of heavy-duty memorization to do in all of 10 days.
“Laura’s a supreme interpreter of Jez’s work,” Mendes says. “It’s a lovely thing to watch. They don’t talk about it much. They just say, ‘Let’s get on with it.’ Jez trusts Laura, and she rarely challenges and doesn’t question. She wants to bring the text to life and trusts we will tell the story. She’s a remarkable actress, so economical and so uninterested in courting the audience.”
Here, Donnelly plays Veronica Webb, a single mom who operates the run-down Sea View Guest House in Blackpool, England, and uses the wait-staff (her four teenage daughters) to entertain what guests happen by with an assortment of somewhat tarnished Golden Oldies. “A song is a place to be,” she tells them. “Somewhere where you can live and where you can go anywhere.”
The girls’ repertoire centers on standards, some of which would have been relatively new in 1955 (“When I Fall In Love” was just three years old at the point) and others of which (like “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B,” introduced in 1941 by the Andrews Sisters, a model for the sister act) were already beginning to gather dust. The obvious flaw with these selections is apparent to an American talent scout who’s inveigled into catching the act, and he levels with their mother. For Mendes, his truth unravels Veronica’s out-of-touch ambitions. “The agent says, ‘Have you heard of Elvis Presley?’ and she says, ‘I don’t know what that is.’ It is a moment where the world has turned, and she’s missed it. Then, he flatly tells her, ‘This is not popular music. It’s not what people want anymore.’”
His darker motives start to emerge when he spots potential in the oldest daughter, 15-year-old Joan, and negotiates with Veronica for a private guest-room to audition. This earns her a shot at genuine stardom as well as an easy exit from a dead, eventless life by the English seashore.
Two decades later, a grown-up, hardened Joan (now Donnelly, in her overhauled role) returns to her roots—to a mother dying upstairs in the now-ghostly, four-story hotel and to three sisters full of festering regrets and flat notes; two of them married, and one never left home. Joan’s place in the Hollywood sun came and went, she tells her sisters, and once, reduced to pizza-delivery during “a slow period,” she came into actual contact with two surviving Andrews Sisters.
There’s a scene when the adult Joan starts up those stairs to her mother—and stops, frozen by the sight of the adolescent Joan. “That was me,” Mendes confesses. “I needed to animate that moment, and it was difficult. It’s a moment when the idea of two actors playing the same role—one a teenager and the other in her 30s—can pay off, something you can do on stage that you can never do in any other form. You’ve got one part of the play speaking to the other.
“This is one of the hardest plays that I have ever directed. It’s both big in scale and seemingly robust, but it’s also delicate and needs so much precision and a kind of gentle hand. And still, you must keep this big sweep, keep the thing moving and evolving in a kind of space and time.”
One of Life’s Little Ironies is that, next month, Veronica Webb at the Broadhurst will be rubbing elbows with Audra McDonald at the Majestic, playing the definitive Pushy Stage Mom, Gypsy’s Mama Rose. Mendes, who directed Bernadette Peters’ Tony-winning Mama Rose 20 years ago, allows there’s a connection. “But no one in the U.K. mentions it. Gypsy is so much the main artery of show business in New York. I didn’t read The Hills of California so much like that. I don’t feel it’s a stage mother thrusting her daughters into show business. Yes, that’s what happens in the narrative, but the play at its roots is about something completely different.
