Playwright Jez Butterworth breaks down a pivotal scene change in “The Hills of California”
"It intensified and became more of what it was I was trying to do," Butterworth says of changing the third act before the play's transfer to Broadway.
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What does it take to make it possible for one person to forgive another?That's the question at the heart of Jez Butterworth's new play, The Hills of California, but the play's themes weren't always that clear cut. The playwright made significant revisions to the third act between its award-nominated run in London's West End and its opening night on Broadway earlier this fall.The play, which divides its time between 1976 and the 1955, brings together the recollections of the Webb sisters as they gather to await their mother's impending death and the traumatizing moments of the past when their fame-obsessed mother drove them to their breaking point."I decided to try to focus on why we'd all been called to the meeting, or what it was we needed the answer to," Butterworth says of his decision to revise the play before bringing it stateside. "And what we needed the answer to was, is this person going to forgive their mother?"
Joan Marcus Leanne Best, Ophelia Lovibond, Helena Wilson, Laura Donnelly in 'The Hills of California'' title='Leanne Best, Ophelia Lovibond, Helena Wilson, Laura Donnelly in 'The Hills of California''>
Joan Marcus Leanne Best, Ophelia Lovibond, Helena Wilson, Laura Donnelly in 'The Hills of California'
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Largely, he wanted to give the audience more insight into the character of Joan, the sister who ran off to California and hasn't been home in years. "Now, you have a Joan who is not only more known to the audience, but also unknown, just in a clearer way," he explains. "There's such a difference between ambiguity and obscurity. If you're told two very clear opposing things, that's art. If you're just left in the dark, it's not."Much of the play's reshaping hinges on a key new scene in the third act. Here, Butterworth shares annotated script pages from that scene and breaks it down for us.1) The art of revision
'The Hills of California' script
Butterworth notes that this scene is where the play begins to change from the London production. "I was drawn to it because I can see what I've done and reliably identify why it works and why the play, from that moment forward, intensified and became more of what it was I was trying to do," he says."A lot of my plays, when I finish imagining them, have a head and two arms and three legs," Butterworth continues. "Usually over the course of the rehearsal process, I work out which leg it is that's got to go. I didn't get the chance to be in rehearsals as much as I normally would. So, I only identified the problem with the extra leg when we were up and running in the West End. But I thought, 'I really like the play the way it's shaped. I'm okay with it. I'm kind of glad that it's not entirely what I intended. It's got a strange beauty. But when we go to New York, I'm going to see what I can do to really stick the landing of this play.'"Butterworth adds that he felt the London version of the show "skirted" the answer to this question of forgiveness. "Rather than have a character, Joan, show up completely and present everyone with another problem, I needed to face full on what she had experienced," he explains. "I realized I had an opportunity to bring her back 20 years later to something that the audience saw 20 minutes ago. There could be different versions of an event that they all just witnessed that the people on the stage are having to go back two decades to remember. And then I wanted to arrange those memories in counterpoint, and crucially, I wanted to navigate Joan's state of mind."2) Spur of the moment gifts
'The Hills of California' script
Butterworth describes the presents that Joan gives to her sisters as "impromptu" in his notes, telling EW that Joan is deciding in that moment which of her possessions she will pass off as a gift. "There's a few clues," he notes. "The fact that she gives a zippo to her sister .and her sister says that, 'You didn't even know I smoked.' Because she didn't. So, why would you ever decide to give a zippo to someone when only two pages before, she said, 'You smoke?'""She, as it were, is going into Santa Claus' sack and getting out whatever she can find," he continues. "My mom does that all the time. There's nothing that personal about what you get. Last Christmas, she gave me a book that had my name written in it from 30 years before. She tried to pretend that it was from a store and that she bought it for me, but she had obviously picked it up off the shelf on the way out."
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3) "Ambiguous care"The words almost seem an oxymoron. How can one's care be ambiguous? But nevertheless, that's how Butterworth describes the essence of the presents that Joan gives her sisters. "She wants to give them things and to make a connection with these people who she loves but who have not been always on her mind," the playwright explains. "She has not kept track of them, but she loves them. She feels that she wants to give something."Additionally, the scene allows Butterworth to shade in a lot of what Joan's been up to over the last 20 years without heaps of exposition. "You get to see and find out things about her life through those gifts," he notes. "45 seconds later, you've got a portrait of Joan that you didn't have before. You get these little glimpses of what her life has been along the way, who she's met, who she's ran with."Butterworth also stresses that the stories that Joan attaches to the items, particularly the origins of the lighter, the ring, and the non-existent harmonica, are absolutely true. "She's not handing out Keith Richards' scarf or Jim Hendrix's amp," he quips. "She's giving gifts away that are obscure to the people that are receiving them. They're impromptu; they're of value to her. They're not of value to the people that they're being given to."
Marleen Moise/Getty Playwright Jez Butterworth
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4) Forgetting GloriaJust as important as the gifts themselves is the fact that Joan can't find the present she intends for Gloria. Even though she's choosing these items on the spot, she somehow forgets Gloria. "It's excluding Gloria," notes Butterworth. "I watch things like this happen all the time throughout my life. You forget on purpose. Why is it she has nothing for Gloria? Why doesn't she pull something else out of that bag and try it? It's very interesting psychologically."5) A full houseIn his notes here, and throughout our conversation, Butterworth refers to dialogue or moments having both a "ceiling and a floor." What he means by that is the ability for a dramatic sequence to serve a dual purpose. "The idea of a moment being a floor and a ceiling is it's doing double duty," he explains.For instance, the gifts not only give us insight into Joan, but also amplify Gloria's role and resentment in the situation. "The audience's attention at that point is on the fact that Gloria has been snubbed," he adds. "It's like King Lear — 'I've got something for you, got something for you, nothing for you.' There's a fairytale quality to it. Gloria's nose is out of joint and your attention is on that rather than on the fact that Joan can't remember."
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6) Memory is a fickle thing
But the fact is Joan can't remember. She won't allow herself to, and that's evident in her inability to recall where the piano was located in the room and what instrument Gloria played. Butterworth wants the play to illustrate not only the elusive nature of memory when it comes to trauma, but how fluid it can be even under the best of circumstances."From the very beginning, the audience is told, 'This person doesn't really remember this place very well,'" he says. "We remember what is useful to us. Only yesterday I watched Crosby, Stills, and Nash on YouTube all fighting over when they first sang together. Each of them had a very vivid sense memory of when it was — and they were all different places. We remember things to bolster our narrative of who we are and we forget the things which attack that. It's quite a moment in life, isn't it, when you realize that it's not a record of what happened, your memory, it's something else entirely. It's as indistinct as the future."
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7) Open the floodgates
Butterworth does, however, note that Joan's inability to remember that Gloria played the ukulele is "a barrier that can be removed." It's part of what she has erased from her memory, but it is also something that can be triggered by an object or a ghost, like that of the sight of her younger self on the stairs leading to her mother's room.The playwright was inspired to put in a moment that causes all of Joan's memories to come flooding back by his own experiences with his father. "It was a theatrical prop, as it were, that my father saw that reminded him that he had been on Omaha beach on D-Day," Butterworth reveals. "My little brother came home in a crimson duffle coat. On the morning of D-Day, the English seamen were issued with cream duffle coats, which by the end of the day were blood red. He hadn't seen a blood red duffle coat for 50 years. But when he saw it, he remembered everything. And he spent the next year of his life telling us everything. It had all been buried, and it was opened up by something that he saw. ""Joan sees herself," he continues. "I completely believe in the idea that she then remembers that it's a ukulele and that what comes with that memory is everything else that she walked in the door half an hour before not knowing. They come back to her. I believe that because I've seen it." Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.
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