The Hills of California's Jez Butterworth and Laura Donnelly on Music and Family

In Act Three of The Hills of California, the actress Laura Donnelly makes what might be the most thrilling character entrance on Broadway this year.

In an empty parlor in the middle of the night, a jukebox stirs to life. The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” kicks off: Keith Richards picks out some spiky notes on a guitar, Jimmy Miller scrapes the güiro, Merry Clayton adds her ghostly oohs and Nicky Hopkins thuds out a piano note way down on the low end of the keyboard, as ominous as thunder.

Enter Joan, whose arrival has been built up since the play's earliest moments, carrying herself like a rock star in Afghan coat, flared jeans and gold metallic blouse. She surveys her childhood home—as the whole structure revolves like a vinyl record—with an air of cool detachment, taking long drags of what is likely her umpteenth cigarette of the day.

Ooh, a storm is threatening
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Ooh yeah, I'm gonna fade away.

It’s a rock'n'roll moment in a play in which music plays an integral role. The Hills of California tells the story of four sisters who, as young girls in Blackpool, England, are trained to be an Andrews Sisters-style close-harmony quartet by their taskmaster mother Veronica (also played by Donnelly). In Act Three, Joan, the eldest sister, has returned home after pursuing a musical career of sorts in America. By this time, there's far less harmony between the siblings, and mother is upstairs at death's door.

As the dark energy of “Gimme Shelter” might suggest, the home is also haunted by the specter of painful, even dangerous memories.

The playwright Jez Butterworth constantly listens to music when he is writing. “It doesn't need to be specific to what I'm doing, but it often is,” he told Beth Stevens on The Broadway Show. “I often find that I've unconsciously chosen something for the rhythm of what I'm writing and it helps with that."

One of Butterworth’s ideas for the play early on was to intentionally set the story—which unfolds in 1955 and 1976—before and after the heyday of rock’n’roll. The idea was to “show the difference in Veronica’s life and Joan’s life on either side of that phenomenon,” he said. “It felt like a real find to set something just right before and right afterwards—and miss out the bit in between. But yeah, I'm obsessed with rock'n'roll—I was when I was four and I am today.”

There’s a sense of music naturally inherent in Butterworth’s playwriting too. “One of the first things that strikes me when I’m reading through a play of his is the rhythm of it—that usually entirely informs how I’m going to play it,” said Donnelly, who starred in Butterworth’s plays The River and The Ferryman. “The majority of the work that I needed to do on it wasn't going to be through research or digging into the motivations and the intentions and the character. It was just the rhythm of the writing.”

Butterworth and Donnelly are partners in life as well as in theater. The Ferryman, set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, was heavily inspired by Donnelly’s family history; in 1981, her uncle was “disappeared” by the IRA. By contrast, while elements of The Hills of California was inspired by Donnelly’s performing childhood—Butterworth used to refer to her family as “The Family Muck Trapp”—the bulk of it draws on Butterworth’s own family history: “a stew of all sorts of pain, trauma and loss.” The drawn-out deathbed gathering for his sister, who died from cancer; his uncle’s glamorous homecoming from America; his relationship with his own four daughters—all of this is in the play, transfigured through the lens of fiction.

Though Butterworth admits, “Whenever I embark on trying to explain where this comes from, it's like I still genuinely don't really know. When a songwriter sits down to write a song, I'm pretty sure they don't have bullet points of things that they need to cross off and go through from their own life. It's kind of like a waking dream.”

Similarly, Butterworth doesn’t remember a moment when he decided the central characters of his new play would be women. “It's an odd thing when a play idea forms in my head. It’s like a doorbell rings and you open it and there's characters standing there, and you decide whether or not you're going to let them in.” He added, “I'm not really sure why they come to the door. [Female characters] don't come to the door often enough for my liking, but when they do, I let 'em in.”

Check out the full segment below.