Broadhurst Theatre

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The ancient Greeks, in the earliest extant plays in the Western canon, frequently drew on mythology in their treatment of human conflicts. So does the modern British playwright Jez Butterworth. In Jerusalem (2009), he took on the primal magic embedded in English identity; The Ferryman (2017) was suffused with Irish folklore. And although his captivating and poignant new drama, The Hills of California, takes place in the brackish British seaside town of Blackpool, it is centrally concerned with another regional mythos: the American Dream.  To depict the tangled Webb family, the play toggles between two decades. Much of it takes place in 1976, when three adult sisters reunite at the Sea View, a guest house owned by the family; their mother, Veronica, is dying of cancer on an upper floor, and a fourth sister—the eldest, Joan, who moved to the U.S. some 20 years earlier—hasn’t shown up. But Butterworth shifts periods, periodically, to show us the same characters in 1955, when Veronica (played by a magnetically steely Laura Donnelly) is trying her best to mold them into child stars in a singing sister act. Veronica’s showbiz model is the Andrews Sisters; the girls not only perform that trio’s close-harmony hits (“Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Straighten Up and Fly Right”) but also reenact their publicity interviews at the kitchen table. The goal is to reach the American paradise extolled in another of the numbers Veronica chooses: a throwaway...