[MUSIC]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. In the new play from Jez Butterworth, the Webb Sisters gather to a final goodbye to their mother as she lies dying. It's 1976, and Jill, Gloria and Ruby are stationed at their mother's rundown guest house in Blackpool, England. They are waiting for their fourth sister, Joan, who may or may not be coming home from California. She hasn't been back to England in years.

The play then takes us back to the 1950s when the four sisters were schoolgirls under the fierce eye of their mother, Veronica. She's played by Laura Donnelly. Veronica is determined that her daughters become singing sensations, the next Andrews sisters. Here's a clip from the play of Veronica playing piano as her girls sing.

Veronica: What is a song?

?Speaker: A song is a dream.

Veronica: And?

Webb Sisters: A place to be.

Veronica: A song is a place to be. [plays piano] Somewhere you can live. And in that place, there are no walls, no boundaries, no locks, no keys. You can go anywhere. I want you to picture yourself in a warm, high place, the Californian Hills. A dry, warm breeze blowing from the south, kicking up the dust upon the red scarred earth. No rain, but still, the scent of jasmine wafts through the canyon. The warmth of the sun on your face. The sound of buzzards. What else?

?Speaker: Eagles.

Veronica: Eagles.

?Speaker: Crickets.

?Speaker: The ocean.

Veronica: The Hills of California are something to see.

Webb Sisters: The sun will kind of warm you.

Alison Stewart: But as we learn the play, only one girl has a shot at stardom, the oldest, Joan, who eventually moves to California, and there's a reason that Joan hasn't been home in years. The Hills of California is running at the Broadhurst Theater through December 22nd. It's written by Tony Award-winning playwright Jez Butterworth, who also wrote The Ferryman. Hi, Jez.

Jez Butterworth: Hi there.

Alison Stewart: And also joining us via Zoom is Oscar and Tony-winning director, Sam Mendes. Hi, Sam.

Sam Mendes: Hello.

Alison Stewart: Hello. And also, it stars Laura Donnelly, and well, we'll talk about this later, in the play. Hi, Laura. Nice to speak to you.

Laura Donnelly: Hello.

Alison Stewart: Jez, the play is about so much, but it's really largely about how sisters interact with one another I found. What interested you about the dynamic of sisters?

Jez Butterworth: Well, to start with, it wasn't sisters. It was just going to-- I thought to start with, I was going to write about brothers because I'm one of four brothers. My sister died 12 years ago and we all gathered at her bedside. I thought that was the play I was going to write. It was only when I sat down and began that all of the voices were female, that everyone that walked onto the stage was female. I was as surprised as anybody else, but that's just how it goes. It's not the first time I've sat down with one plan and to discover that wherever these things come from has a completely different agenda.

Alison Stewart: Do you have sisters? Yeah?

Laura Donnelly: I do. I have two sisters that I grew up with and a brother, and I have another half-sister and a half-brother who are much younger than me.

Alison Stewart: How did the aspects of sisterhood relate to your performance?

Laura Donnelly: I think there's just an understanding there, and this exists with all of the women who play the grown-up sisters in the play. We all have sisters. There is just an innate understanding there of the kind of absolutely the deep truths that will be drawn out of one another, the viciousness with which we can treat one another, and then within 30 seconds, there's just an understanding that there's a love and a connection there that won't really go anywhere. So, yeah, that was just something that we all brought into the rehearsal room with us already, I think.

Alison Stewart: Sam, you met Jez a long time ago. You worked with him in film, most recently on The Ferryman. Where were you when you read The Hills of California, and what were your first instincts?

Sam Mendes: I was at home. He sent me half the play, were the first two acts, and I just thought it was beautiful. I thought it was a very tender, gentle play at its core. Even though it was about grief on the surface, and about memory, and about something terrible that had happened many years ago, it seemed to find another texture, another voice that I'd never seen in Jez's work before. It was very moving, and that's without having read the third act.

But I should add also that I have no brothers, all sisters, but it speaks to me probably I feel as clearly as it does to people who do have siblings. I think that's one of the great gifts of the play, is you think not just about siblings, but about mothers, daughters, wives, partners as well. I think I find it a very universal play, and I was struck by that when I read it for the first time.

Alison Stewart: Jez, you did a bit of rewriting between the West End and Broadway. What did you find you needed more of? What did you find you needed less of in the play?

Jez Butterworth: When I complete a play, I think it has a head, two arms, and three legs, and I have to work out which leg needs to come off. I think that when we went into the West End, it found its way onto the stage with all three legs intact. They were all good, and they all worked, and I enjoyed the play immensely there, but felt in my bones that it needed a slightly different shape in its last act, that there was a greater intensity, just straightforward, dramatic intensity available that I had not yet tapped into. I wanted to seek that down and make it happen in New York, and I feel we did.

Alison Stewart: Sam, we flip back and forth between the children, set in '58, and the adults they become around 1976. As a director, how did you want to draw the connection between the younger girls and the adults they become?

Sam Mendes: I mean, it's interesting, because the play is the first play Jez has ever written that exists in two time scales. It also does that very difficult and delicate thing of having two sets of actors playing the same character, as you say. You've got Ruby, for example, age 14, and then you have her in her 30s, and the same with all of the sisters. For me, it was about how-- I wanted the cast to feel involved in every aspect of the play, because it's very easy with a play like this to feel it's two plays that don't speak to each other.

What Jez did, which I thought was really skillful, is that he also cross-cast within the rest of the company so all the actors appear in both timescales, and I think that that's-- or most of them do, and so there is a kind of dialogue that exists between 1955 and 1976. Then we were gifted with four miraculous young actresses who just sat in the room watching their elder counterparts, their more experienced counterparts as actors, and they just soaked it up. It was a beautiful process of osmosis to watch how each sister became the same character, really. I thought that was really touching. I didn't really have to say that much to make them feel as if they were playing the same character.

Alison Stewart: This is a spoiler alert, but I think most people who have read about the play at this point know this, that you play two versions, two people in the play, Laura. You play the adult Joan, and the mother, Veronica. How was your approach different to Veronica as opposed to Joan? Or is there just emotional overlap between the two?

Laura Donnelly: I think there's some overlap, but really, the task was to create two people who were as different as possible, because obviously, I bring with me in my face a lot of the similarities. I just had to-- they spoke to one another as I developed each of them. I didn't develop Veronica first and then think about Joan, even though that is the order in which I play them. It was from the moment I was thinking of how I might create Veronica, I was thinking of how that might be as different as possible to Joan. I had to go through everything, and wanted to go through everything in terms of physicality, voice quality, as well as, obviously, accents is one of the obvious ones.

Alison Stewart: That's what I was going to ask. The accent work is tremendous. You sort of have a California sort of vocal fry a little bit on Joan. How did you work on the accent?

Laura Donnelly: Well, with Joan, the idea of her having been away so long and also wanting to have changed, wanting to have left Blackpool behind, contributed to how much of that Californian accent I was going to bring in. Because at the beginning, I was going to attempt some kind of hybrid. Then I realized that actually, it seemed to fit with her psychology, that she would want to have fully just become a Californian and wanted to fit into that world. Then I just thought about the fact that she'd have been drinking and smoking a lot, and been on tour, and singing very, very loud most nights of her of the last 20 years. Just tried to bring a little bit of that into the quality of her voice. So, yeah, again, it was just a case of trying to make it as different as possible to Veronica.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Jez Butterworth, Laura Donnelly and Sam Mendes. We are talking about The Hills of California. The show is running through December 22nd at the Broadhurst Theater. Let's listen to a clip from the show. This is the mother, Veronica, played by Laura Donnelly, training her young daughters for a performance.

Veronica: Ruby, you're flat as a flam top of two. Gloria, stop dead on the second T of start. Straighten up, eyes front, chin up, chest out, three, four.

[MUSIC - Nat King Cole: Straighten Up and Fly Right]

Webb Sisters: A buzzard took the monkey for a ride in the air

The monkey thought that everything was on the square

The buzzard tried to throw the monkey off his back

The monkey grabbed his neck and said, "Now, listen, Jack

Straighten up and fly right, straighten up and fly right

Straighten up and fly right, cool down papa, don't you blow your top

Ain't no use in divin'. What's the use of jivin'?

Straighten up and fly right, cool down papa, don't you blow your top"

Alison Stewart: Laura, why is Veronica so determined to make her daughters successful singers?

Laura Donnelly: I think she sees it as a way to give them a life and a safety that has not been available to her. I don't think it's vicarious living. I don't think that she herself had wanted to be a star and now wants that for them. I think that she has lived what feels like a very limited life in Blackpool. She has been running this business and raising this family by herself, and it's a hard, hard life. I think that she just wants them to have something more magical.

Alison Stewart: Sam, there's a key performance where the young sisters have snagged a chance to audition for a big agent. What did you want to achieve with that performance, especially through the choreography of the young girls?

Sam Mendes: Are you talking about the performance of the. number for the agent? Is that what you're--?

Alison Stewart: Yes, yes.

Sam Mendes: Well, they had to be good enough for the audience to believe that they had a chance, but they're also-- I don't want to ruin it for people who haven't seen the play, but there's a sense in which history has passed them by. This is the '55. Elvis has arrived, and the kind of music that they're singing, close harmony groups, it's going out of fashion. And so Jez finds that moment where-- sort of tipping point where history is turned against them, but you also have to be enchanted enough by them to think that they could succeed as a novelty group. Or as Veronica Laura's character suggests, in tandem with a big star.

The play reveals in that latter day plot what they felt about performing, who loved it, what they felt about each other, who was a square peg forced into a round hole, and the scars that's left on all of them. But in the moment, there's something magical about it and I think the audience feels that.

Alison Stewart: We'll have more with The Hills of California, Jez Butterworth, Laura Donnelly and Sam Mendes after a quick break. This is All--

[MUSIC]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We're talking about The Hills of California. My guests are playwright, Jez Butterworth, director, Sam Mendes, and Laura Donnelly, who stars as both Veronica and her eldest daughter, Joan. The show is running through December 22 at the Broadhurst Theater. Jez, for Americans who aren't familiar with Blackpool, England, what did you want to communicate through the script about what that area of England was like?

Jez Butterworth: Well, Blackpool is probably analogous with a place like Atlantic City in that it had its heyday some time ago and has fallen upon hard times. Blackpool in the '50s, where the play begins, there were 64 theaters of more than 1,000 capacity, and now there were four, and that was already very much in decline by the '70s. The second, that you had cheap air travel, and that people could go to Torremolinos or fly to Spain or France cheaper than they could have a holiday in Blackpool, then Blackpool was doomed.

Alison Stewart: Why do these girls have dreams of America? Every room in the guesthouse is named after a state.

Jez Butterworth: Yeah. So I was born in '69, and America in the '70s was just Shangri-La. You only had four channels, three channels on TV at that point, and the American TV shows just seemed to occupy, breathe a different air. They seemed to be from somewhere else that was paradisical. I remember my brother Steve went to America, none of us had ever been abroad, and he went to America with my uncle in 1978. When he came back, it was like it was Neil Armstrong. He'd come back from this place where he had things like he had a baseball mitt and he had like a mellow yellow watch. He had all these different things. They just seemed like such a holy place, and I think that it is. It is kind of must-go for the for the three sisters. It felt to us like this unattainable heaven.

Alison Stewart: Laura, without giving too much away, there's a pivotal moment where Veronica tries to intervene in a situation, but ultimately, she doesn't. She decides not to do anything. In your mind, without giving too much away, why doesn't she do something in that moment?

Laura Donnelly: I think because she doesn't know if she is about to destroy the potential of the situation for her daughters for no reason whatsoever. I think what I find really interesting about that scene and the lead up to it is that everyone in the audience also thinks that she's being vain or silly in her attempts to intervene. People laugh in the moments that Veronica sees danger coming. They still don't, and it's not until the moment itself. Veronica realizes in the same moment she's made that mistake as the audience realizes it.

In fact, in hindsight, a lot of the audience then think of Veronica as a terrible mother or somebody who, you know, an absolute monster. I completely disagree because even they don't see it coming. Even in this era where we are so much more attuned to those dangers, people still don't see it.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to another clip from The Hills of California. This is Veronica explaining to one of her boarders why she is so determined that her girls make it in show biz.

Veronica: These acts were better six months ago. It's going off the boil. It kills me to admit it, but if I can feel it, they can feel it in their little bones. They think I'm lying to them. Why? Because I am. I look in their eyes and I can see the fire going out. Now, I will not sit back and watch their dreams die, because that's what's happening. That's what's happening right now. You're living here on hot air and tick, Jack Larkin. I've had it. Give me three months rent and git. I must have been crackers to listen to you.

Jack Larkin: I see. Well, then, you won't want to hear what I've got to say.

Veronica: You know what, Jack? You're dead right there.

Jack Larkin: Suit yourself.

Veronica: Do you know what? I will. I will suit myself.

Jack Larkin: Look, I know how much you want your lassies to prosper.

Veronica: Don't make me come over there. Prosper? Prosper? You want prosper, go work in a bank. I want them to live, to soar, not dragged down by St. Bartholomew's or you, or anyone. My girls are the Webbs and the Webbs aren't 10 a penny. They only made one lot and they are here. They are right here.

Alison Stewart: Oh, my gosh. I wish you could see. Laura has her headphones on top of her head. She can't hear herself. Why can't you listen to yourself?

Laura Donnelly: It sounds like the worst acting ever.

Jez Butterworth: It's not that bad. Come on, you're doing yourself.

Laura Donnelly: No, I don't think anyone likes the sound of their own voice. But when you're also attempting it in a different accent and trying to be somebody else, it's absolutely intolerable and it will affect what I do tonight, because I'll go on thinking, "Well, I can't do it like that."

Alison Stewart: Oh, no. Okay. Please put them on your forehead. You don't want to change your performance at all. Sam, the set rotates, the kitchen, which represents the '50s to the front parlor of the hotel in 1976. The front parlor is busy and crowded, tiki bar, broken jukebox and the back kitchen is fairly spare, table, chairs. What conversations did you have with the set design team about what you wanted these sets to look like?

Sam Mendes: I wanted the whole place to feel a little bit like a haunted house. I think that it's a place where memories live on as ghosts. The feeling that the guest house was once crowded, and full of people, and life and gossip, and incidents, and now was a kind of mausoleum, a place of memories, and where only one sister is left, tending to her ailing mother. I mean, one room and all the others are empty. I loved the way that the whole set kind of breathed in and breathed out. Both spaces, both the kitchen and the parlor, have to exist in both time periods to a degree. It was important that it didn't feel too trapped in time. I think people who've been in guest houses, it's no surprise that, particularly ones that on the outskirts of Blackpool, haven't changed their furniture for 30 years, because everything's pretty much identical as it was in the '50s. It just seems older and sadder.

There's always a kind of poetic naturalism with Jez's plays. You need naturalistic detail. You need to feel the texture of life, layers, people being there leaving behind signs of living and the detritus of 20 years. But at the same time, they also breathe a different kind of air at times as well. This one particularly, music and memory and time shifting as the play moves back and forth and.

Yeah, I think Rob Howell did, who's the designer, did a beautiful job creating a kind of Escher-like staircase that goes up and up and in some cases, right out of sight, so there are certain key entrances and exits that exist beyond the stage space. I wanted it to feel like a hall of mirrors at times, and in some way, it succeeds. I hope it does.

Alison Stewart: Did the set look like what you thought it would look like, Jez, in your mind's eye?

Jez Butterworth: When I was shown the model of the set in Sam's office by Rob and Sam, I burst into tears, which is not usual when you see a model of a set, but it just affected me so much. It was so perfectly expressed, the way that the naturalism of the stage level just went up into this kind of Escher-like, dreamlike space above and how it spun like a record. It just felt like everything about it was fabulously expressed. Rob has won five Tony awards for design and costume design. It's no surprise that when he unveiled it, that it had an extraordinary, breathtaking effect on me, and that was something that was about two feet high.

Alison Stewart: Laura, what do you hope audiences leave the theater talking about, thinking about the next day?

Laura Donnelly: Their own experiences, because I think that it hopefully has everybody recognizing something of themselves and their own history with their own family in it. It speaks to a universal experience, I think, of what it is like to grow up in a family and how our memories are shaped and the roles we fall into within those families. I think, far more than leaving thinking about, "What has happened to those characters?" I'd love them to be reflecting on what's happened to them.

Alison Stewart: The Hills of California is running through December 22nd at the Broadhurst Theater. Thanks to Sam Mendez, as well as Laura Donnelly and playwright, Jez Butterworth. Thanks so much for your time today. We really appreciate it.

Laura Donnelly: Thank you.

Sam Mendes: Thank you.

Jez Butterworth: Thank you.