The setting for “The Hills of California,” Jez Butterworth’s usually comedian, secretly heartsick drama, now on the Broadhurst, is an retro guesthouse within the seaside resort city of Blackpool, within the North of England. Don’t go in anticipating a hill, or the sunny American West: the title comes from a Johnny Mercer tune, which we hear through the play, in assorted wistful strains. (“The hills of California are somethin’ to see / the solar will kinda heat ya—” the tune guarantees ambivalently.) The astonishing Laura Donnelly, who starred in Butterworth’s Tony Award-winning tragedy, “The Ferryman,” performs the guesthouse’s proprietor, Veronica Webb, a martinet we meet issuing orders to her 4 teen-age daughters within the nineteen-fifties. Veronica is a mum on a mission: she’s decided to launch her daughters as a close-harmony act, a note-for-note imitation of the Andrews Sisters—a reference that she doesn’t notice could also be sliding old-fashioned.
Butterworth doesn’t disguise that “Hills” echoes Arthur Laurents’s musical “Gypsy”—in “Hills,” the hard-charging stage mom’s favourite and most gifted baby is fifteen-year-old Joan (Lara McDonnell), only a vowel shift away from June, one of many child-actor siblings in “Gypsy.” However Butterworth, amongst our most refined structuralists, additionally builds a sophisticated temporal armature for the acquainted story of a deluded, fame-hungry stage mom. We see the characters in two eras, performed by two teams of actors: in 1955, as tap-dancing, ditty-crooning adolescents, and in 1976, as adults, once they come dwelling to Blackpool to see their mom on her deathbed.
Butterworth is preoccupied with doubles, notably the sort of copy that has the ability to sap its authentic. (“I really feel like somebody xeroxed me throughout the planet,” one of many sisters drawls, weary after a visit.) The grownups are bitter—and bitterly humorous—mimeographs of their brighter younger selves: shy Jillian (Helena Wilson) by no means left dwelling; Ruby (Ophelia Lovibond) scarcely makes use of her thrilling, throaty singing voice and kind of despises her sad-sack husband, Dennis (Bryan Dick). “You recognize if Dennis have been to stroll out of right here and grow to be a lacking particular person, and I needed to describe him to the police, I genuinely wouldn’t know the place to start out,” she cracks. Vicious Gloria (Leanne Finest, in beautiful dragon mode) has a fair sadder, sackier husband, Invoice (Richard Quick). Joan, the one one who went into present biz, is usually a glamorous absence: she left after a mysterious household rupture, and she or he’s speculated to be flying in from California for her first go to in twenty years. The sisters anticipate her, as they largely keep away from their dying, now alcoholic mom, who stays upstairs, out of sight. Gloria, having appeared in on Veronica’s sickroom, describes her, horrifyingly, as a “cranium with a rag hanging out of it.”
Time flows forwards and backwards. By way of a revolving set, we alternate between the guesthouse’s two sides—the household’s personal kitchen and the general public entrance room—and the soda-pop fifties and the acidic seventies. How a lot of what the sisters say is correct? Reminiscence is one other dangerous copy. A lecherous outdated piano tuner (Richard Lumsden), one in all a number of goatish males, reminisces a couple of fairly totally different Veronica than the bluff and bustling girl we preserve assembly over her personal kitchen desk. In the course of the grownup sisters’ in a single day deathwatch, it’s hellishly scorching within the un-air-conditioned rooming home. To emphasise the purgatorial environment, the director Sam Mendes, who additionally directed “The Ferryman,” makes use of 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 lastly does return dwelling, her grownup self is performed by a a lot remodeled Donnelly; Joan is Veronica’s warped reflection. Even the city’s identify—Blackpool—suggests wanting right into a darkish mirror.
For “The Ferryman,” Butterworth tailored an incident from Donnelly’s personal Northern Irish household’s expertise within the Troubles. Firstly of that play, her character has spent a decade as a kind of half widow; her husband, who had disappeared ten years earlier, has lastly been discovered, mummified in a peat lavatory. In “The Hills,” Donnelly once more performs a maybe-widow: Veronica tells individuals, variously, that her husband’s naval destroyer was torpedoed, that he died on the seaside at Normandy, or that he was misplaced at El Alamein. Butterworth and Donnelly are companions in life, and he appears to love marrying her fictional variations to phantoms—however he’s additionally mining a vein right here, of household secrecy and suspended rot.
Donnelly’s explicit energy is in seeming directly weak and completely terrifying, whereas talking a mile a minute; within the play’s greatest scenes, Butterworth pushes Veronica’s tempo to its most. At one level, she even outtalks a laddish motormouth comic, a tenant (Bryan Dick, once more) who owes her lease. Regardless of all of the showboating badinage—characters throw jokes and native references out so shortly that you just miss the primary simply in time to be run over by the subsequent—this play isn’t Butterworth’s best writing. For one factor, it’s a drama in the hunt for an ending. I noticed “Hills” in London earlier this 12 months, when it had an overstuffed third act. Although this streamlined model is extra muscular, a few of the playwright’s cuts have unbalanced his construction: the principle dramatic pivot rests on the present’s wobbliest scene, and grownup Joan’s late-play entrance cues a sequence of diminishing returns. Nonetheless, Butterworth and Mendes show an exquisite theatrical intelligence all through, notably within the little showstoppers—musical performances, or arias of insult—that punctuate the night time. And craft is at all times a consolation, proper? Veronica does badly in some ways by her women, notably Joan, however the sisters do study concord. Even towards the top, they’re nonetheless finely dovetailing their voices in an aural herringbone, modulating superbly as their lives fall out of tune.
Talking of doppelgängers, David Henry Hwang’s postmodern comedy “Yellow Face,” from 2007, has come, ultimately, to the Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre, almost twenty years after its Off Broadway première, on the Public. Even now, Hwang’s interweaving of reality and invention feels audacious and contemporary: he attracts from the document whereas additionally sneaking in loads of fictional mayhem.
Daniel Dae Kim informs the viewers that he’s DHH, a playwright well-known for writing the breakthrough Broadway hit “M. Butterfly” and for main protests in opposition to cross-racial casting in “Miss Saigon,” which notoriously featured a white actor in a “Eurasian position.” That’s all true of the actual David Henry Hwang. However, in line with this play, historical past then repeats as farce: in his follow-up to “M. Butterfly,” DHH unintentionally casts a white man, Marcus (Ryan Eggold), as his Asian main man, and he has to scramble to cowl up the gaffe.
Hwang, like Butterworth, is desirous about doubles—reality and falsehood, sure, however different pairings, too. The actual drama of “Yellow Face” lies with DHH’s optimistic father, Henry (Francis Jue), who makes hilarious calls from California: he retains volunteering DHH to get individuals tickets to the problematic “Miss Saigon,” and rhapsodizing concerning the American promise of transformation. “So lovely!” Henry sighs, about mainly all the things. In the meantime, DHH confronts a Occasions reporter (Greg Keller) over racist portraits of Chinese language People within the media, the sort of warped mirroring that may do actual hurt.
Leigh Silverman directs a rigorously unspectacular manufacturing, with an nearly dogmatic refusal so as to add any Broadway razzle. The dazzle, subsequently, is reserved for the actors. The ensemble, notably Kevin Del Aguila, makes every kind of mischief, and Kim excels at seeming harried. But it surely’s Jue who walks off with the present. He’s most shifting throughout a speech through which Henry remembers being a pissed off “second son” in China and watching American motion pictures. “All these film stars—Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable and Frank Sinatra—they have been the actual me,” Henry says, wistfully and a little bit proudly. Generally illusions aren’t toxic, he suggests. The hills of California are somethin’ to see. ♦
