TIME'S ARROW

A celebrated Broadway-bound play by Jez Butterworth, The Hills of California, captures the youthful ambitions and dashed dreams of a quartet of English sisters.

- Chloe Schama

Many months ago, when the British playwright Jez Butterworth was starting to ponder the subject for his next work, he was watching a spider build a web in the doorway of his farmhouse in Devon. The sun illuminated each delicate strand as the arachnid labored. “And it didn’t know,” he tells me, “that my dog was going to come running through that doorway from his walk and just smash the whole thing to shit.” That idea—of investing heart and soul in something precarious and fragile, only to have it carelessly destroyed—stayed with the playwright as he began writing The Hills of California, which opens at Broadway’s Broadhurst this month after a run on London’s West End. Hills is the story of a mother, Veronica, and the four daughters she is raising by herself in 1950s Blackpool, a seaside resort town in Lancashire that was once something like the Atlantic City of England—a place for frothy diversions and bad behavior. Veronica and her daughters live in and run the Sea View Guesthouse (no seaside visible), where the quarters are named Minnesota, Indiana, Alabama, and so on; Blackpool may have a boardwalk, but the dream is on the other side of the ocean. “The hills of California will give you a start,” sings Johnny Mercer in the classic American standard— part of the girls’ choreographed act. “I guess I better warn ya, ’cause you’ll lose your heart.”

Veronica is painstakingly cultivating her daughters as a quartet in the mold of the Andrews Sisters, the harmonizing group from Minneapolis that rose from humble beginnings in the 1930s and ’40s to help define the sound of the boogie-woogie era. The hammy bops that propelled the group to fame are on the way out, but Veronica is unaware and undaunted. “Have you heard of Elvis Presley?” asks a talent scout type who shows up to assess the girls. “I don’t know what that is,” she replies.