A English hotel whose name keeps changing to emphasize the sea view it doesn't have is the central metaphor for Jez Butterworth's new opus about four sisters who reunite there when their vivacious stage mother--the family's real star (Laura Donnelly)--is about to expire. Each of the rooms in the cheesy establishment with strict rules is named after an American state; Mississippi is where all the bad things happen.
The Hills of California cuts back and forth between two time periods in the sisters' lives: when the jukebox in their public parlor played the Andrews Sisters, and the play's present, when the same machine, broken for years, suddenly blares the "Gimme Shelter" as the oldest sister Joan (also Laura Donnelly) makes her long-awaited entrance, after spending more than a decade spent incommunicado in California. Baby-Boomer goosebumps are guaranteed. Ms. Donnelly's performances are so commanding that I didn't realize she was playing both roles until I read the Playbill after the show. Butterworth also deliberately sets his play at an analog moment in entertainment history when long-distance illusions were so much easier to sustain.
The slow-burn drama dramatizes nothing less than the gulf between a woman's dreams (and compromises) and the reality of her life lived, particularly as imagined through the eyes of the others left behind. Throughout, I kept hearing "Children Will Listen," Stephen Sondheim's brilliant observation from Into The Woods.
The story itself, at least the part I could hear through the accents and occasionally muffled delivery, doesn't hold many surprises but it packs two major wallops: Donnelly's indelible sleight-of-hand from glamorous war widow into louche hippie, and the sweet harmonies her sisters sing as part of their eventual reconciliation, bitter as it may have been.
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