Tony Nominee Laura Donnelly: The Hills of California Became a Brand New Play in 10 Days

When West End productions transfer to Broadway, they typically arrive intact. The New York stagings of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem and The Ferryman, for example, were near-identical replicas of their London counterparts. But with The Hills of California, audiences who had seen the show at the Harold Pinter Theatre were in for a shock: the version that opened at the Broadhurst was dramatically reimagined.

A sweeping family drama, The Hills of California unfolds across two timelines in a seaside hotel in Blackpool, England. In 1976, sisters Gloria, Ruby, and Jillian reunite at the bedside of their dying mother, Veronica, anxiously awaiting the arrival of their long-estranged sister Joan, who’s been living in America for years. Flashbacks to the 1950s reveal the sisters’ childhood, shaped by a fiercely ambitious mother determined to secure a better life for her daughters. As the past collides with the present, the story unearths the pivotal event that drove Joan away—and ultimately altered the course of the entire family’s lives.

In the original third act, Joan’s long-awaited return—dressed in striking hippie regalia and making her entrance to “Gimme Shelter” blaring from a jukebox—came with a shock: a baby she planned to abandon with one of her sisters. But something about the moment felt off when I saw it in London. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Jez Butterworth, director Sam Mendes, and the cast felt the same way.

“It was clear that the first and second acts worked pretty much exactly as I would want them to,” Butterworth told me as the show began performances on Broadway. “But there was something in the craft of the last act that felt like the play moved away from the audience slightly. I can’t describe it as anything other than a moment that troubled me.”

So, in the months between the show’s West End closing and its Broadway debut, Butterworth set about solving the problem.

That’s where his partner, actor Laura Donnelly, comes in. She originated the dual roles of Veronica and Joan in London, and also sensed something unfinished about the story arc, a feeling that left her carrying the play with her in daily life. When Butterworth handed her the revised script—on her birthday, no less—she had only one reaction: sheer terror at the realization that she was going to have to come up with a whole new version of Joan in 10 days of rehearsals before the Broadway run began.

Donnelly’s terror, as it turns out, was unfounded. Her brilliant, heartbreaking performance earned a Tony nomination and has already taken home the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Lead Performer in a Broadway Play. Awards aren’t everything, of course—but in this case, the recognition alone feels like the perfect punctuation mark on this unexpected journey.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Take me through the emotional experience of performing The Hills of California in London and New York. Could you feel something incomplete about it?
The London experience was so interesting when I compare it to the New York one. Because of the nature of the third act, and a lot of stuff in the third act not really being dealt with, we all had a sense of carrying it with us from the theater all the time. It had a real effect on our energy levels and our emotional life outside the theater. It felt draining.

We didn’t know that there was any version of it that could be different or better. But Jez knew straight away. Once we were up and running in New York and had the new version of act three, we all realized that we felt lighter by the end of the play. Going about our business outside the theater felt easier because things got wrapped up in a different way on stage. We got to leave it all there. It felt like there was a conclusion that hadn’t existed in London. But it was terrifying. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever had to do.

Why?
We had 10 days to rehearse that new version. In fact, it was less than 10 days because Jez kept rewriting. When we sat down on the first day to read the new act three, I got towards the end of Joan’s speech and burst into tears. It was partly the effect of the writing, but I would say 90 percent was just my sheer terror. I’d never gone through anything like that. And that bloody read-through happened on my birthday. We were supposed to go out for dinner that night, and the end of the day rolled around, and I was like “I am not going anywhere.”

Normally, you read a script and you start getting ideas of who that person is. Jez’s way of writing is to workshop acts as he has them ready. We’d been exploring the first version for several months before we got it on the London stage, so it felt like my creation of Joan in London had come about over months and months, and then from doing it for a couple hundred shows. It gets so deep in your bones and it’s just there in ways that you have no idea about.

Trying to remove all of that, while creating a similar person who says many of the same lines but in totally different contexts, with completely different emotional meanings behind them, as well as shifting her physicality, when the old Joan was just in me, felt like it was going to be impossible. It didn’t matter how many days of rehearsal we were going to have; I just didn’t know how to do it. I really leaned on Sam Mendes, and he literally took me by the hand and helped me so much.

I remember seeing it in London and thinking that if Jez could land the plane in a more complete way, it could be a masterpiece. And I really felt that it was the masterpiece that it was meant to be here in New York.
Oh, thank you. I knew right away that it was the best version if it, the version that it was always supposed to have been. There was no part of me that wanted to say, “Can’t we just keep it the way it was?” But it felt like an entirely new job. We were exploring and discovering it as we went. We really weren’t ready until opening night.

When you were playing Joan in London, did it feel like there wasn’t something there yet? Or were you so deep into it that you couldn’t really think about that?
Often, you don’t know it until you’ve got a different context. When I look back on it, it did feel like I was having to push something uphill, in some moments of act three, especially around the baby stuff. But I wasn’t aware that that’s how I was feeling until we had the newer act three. Walking on as Joan in act three in New York was such a pleasure. When it was really cooking, I noticed the difference.

As a mother of daughters, was it difficult to play Veronica, the mother, and see the impact of some of the choices that she’s made in the second act?
That was very difficult, emotionally speaking. It was slightly easier with Joan because she’s not the cause of her own trauma. I can fully empathize with the choices Veronica made. I don’t think that she’s a monster; I think she represents something that exists in most parents, which is that you want something better for your children than you had. You don’t want them to suffer the same things you did. This was a woman who has to live in an era where women have no agency. She doesn’t have a husband. Men have certainly let her down. She just wants her girls to not have to go through that.

The idea of the whole end of act two…I don’t think anybody sees it coming, even as a modern audience that is much more well versed in the dangers they are facing in that moment. Nobody realizes what’s happening until it’s too late, and the thought that, as a parent of girls, you could make a mistake like that because you weren’t looking in the right direction despite your best intention…

Of course, we are all going to make loads of mistakes in our parenting, and our kids will be in therapy in 20 years, and hopefully it’s from one of the lesser traumas. But I understand every decision that Veronica makes along the way from the top of the play right through to the end of act two. The way she is left is so horrible. I feel so much sorrier for Veronica than any of the other characters.

Obviously, awards don’t measure an actor, but what does the recognition you’ve received for this production feel like?
There was so much support that the four of us actresses had to give each other to get through it all. It was intense. We wrung ourselves absolutely dry doing the original version. For people to have felt the way they did about the new version is just incredible. We knew the whole way through that we were doing worthwhile work, but to know that it had the effect that we wanted to have is so rewarding.