Theater director Loretta Greco first encountered Olivier and Tony Award-winning playwright Jez Butterworth’s play The Hills of California in 2024 when it premiered in London. It was brand spanking new and she was gobsmacked. “I saw it before I read it. I had no sense I was walking into an encounter with a family not unlike my own,” she says in an interview.
Returning to the Bay Area to direct the play’s West Coast debut at Berkeley Rep, Oct. 31-Dec. 7, the former Artistic Director of San Francisco’s Magic Theatre embraces the opportunity to share its complex matrix of elements. Greco suggests local audiences thirst for new, alive, ferocious, and muscular theatrical voices.
“The Bay Area is like no other place on earth. I worked all over the country before I came to the Magic. Leaving after 12 years has not changed what I know, it’s only cemented it. There’s an ecology here around what’s next and art leads the way. Here, appreciation for the new is baked into the bones of people leading theaters and their audiences. Most satisfying; I get to come back, do new, and reimagine old.”
Hills also is a blend of old and new, with the action bouncing jauntily from 1976 to 1955—and back and forth throughout. In the earlier time period, we discover the four Webb sisters growing up in a single-mom led household in a small English seaside town. Veronica, the mother who envisions them as heiresses to The Andrews Sisters, is a force of nature; pushing them to sweat, sing, and soar to fame under her ambitious machinations.
Shifting to the dramatic interactions of 1976, the sisters gather at her Blackpool home to say good bye to their dying matriarch. Joan, Jill, Ruby, and Gloria are individuals with unique characteristics and problems. Their associations with past events is vastly divergent, despite sharing DNA and a childhood closer than most. Painful points are found in one sister’s estrangement from the family, another’s resentment and jealousy, a third’s mental fragility, and a rule-enforcer, turn-teller role no one invited a fourth sister to assume.
Greco herself is one of five close-in-age sisters. Her affinity for the play is innate and rises from a deep understanding of the complexity of “sisterhood in action,” she says. “We’re close in age—five within six-and-a-half years—and yet, our DNA shows up in singular ways. Even though we were raised in the same household with the same parents, going back and looking at the past as a family, as we do, we realize our truths are very different.”
Fortunately for Greco and her sisters, no one person is deemed right and the four others wrong. Acceptance of their varied memories and processing experiences fuels the complexity she admires in the play. “It would be easy if Jez said this version of the past is correct and everybody else’s is false. What I love is that these are complicated, juicy characters. They’re not black and white emotionally or spiritually or intellectually. In my family, we’re five powerful women with shared experiences. We remember them in different ways and that doesn’t make any of us delusional.”
Greco says Butterworth’s skilled handling of what she calls “a great yarn with rich characters who feel honest and true” includes his deft structuring and languistic dexterity. The scenes set in 1955 are not portrayed with sepia-toned Glass Menagerie lighting. The dialogue is robust. The time periods are equal, and jump-cutting between them results in intricate connections and obvious collisions. Some bumper-crashers are funny, others are tense, tragic, and taut with secrets and misconceptions. The music that gives the play its central grounding element and its title is drawn from the Johnny Mercer’s song they sing: “The hills of California are waiting for you….”
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“The play is not set in California,” says Greco. “But Veronica has bought into the American dream that if you work hard enough, you can transcend a modest experience. It’s become their catechism that they will be lifted from the plight of struggling. The Andrews’ repertoire is in their mother’s stories of growing up with grit and it’s the prism through which they are to (view the world). It’s brilliant, the music transports you: It’s a delicious thing.”
Speaking about the five central characters, Greco says Veronica is far more than a cliché stage mother. “Great writing met by great acting can go so many places. Everything Veronica does is out of love for her daughters. It’s what you hope every parent wants for their children. She’s a scrappy woman making it on her own, running a business, working her butt off to keep these teenage girls in line and nurtured. She’s a three-dimensional character and there’s no sugar-coating it. All this in a completely patriarchal society.”
Portraying the sisters, the actors had to sing in close harmonies, and take command of a play that is emotionally deep and wickedly funny, especially in the darkest moments. Courage appears to be the unifying foundation for all of the qualities the script demands of the characters. Greco sees a reflection of that in actual theatrical life.
“The risk-taking of new theater brings trepidation. It’s an economically tough time right now. It’s a moment for great clarity and passion about why we’re doing what we do. It’s more important than ever that we gather and hear stories that remind us that we’re more alike than different.
“Theater always takes great rigor and dedication and now, it’s ten times as hard. Importantly, we have to keep finding portals to reach diverse audiences. The Rep’s work with young people specifically is legendary. They stitch theater into their lives in ways that allows them to grow. Every time I sit in a theater I learn something new, and nothing is more exciting than doing that with other people.”
THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA Fri/31-December 7, Berkeley Rep. More info here.
