‘The Hills of California’ at Berkeley Rep blends kitchen sink drama with showbiz dreams

“A song is a place you can live,” is the gauzy musical motto of Veronica Webb, the thorny Mama Rose to four singing daughters in Jez Butterworth’s tragicomic drama “The Hills of California,” now playing in a finely textured production at the Berkeley Rep.

While Veronica tried to groom her four daughters for success as an Andrews Sisters knockoff group during their 1950s childhoods, the song they live in (and that Veronica’s about to die in) by 1976 is less “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” than a bitter blues. While punctuated by bright comic passages and reprises of long-ago good times, there’s no denying that the sisters reside in a mournful tune.
The action, split across the two time periods, is entirely set at the Seaview Luxury Guesthouse –which offers neither a sea view nor any sign of luxury– in Brighton, England. It’s the Webbs’ family business; already showing signs of decline in desperately cheerful ’50s scenes and frayed, possibly beyond repair, by the time the Webb sisters have grown into the profoundly damaged adults.

In those more recently set scenes, the sisters reunite to reveal a tangle of psychic traumas as their bedridden mother drifts through her final days in a painkilling opiate cloud.

Mothers, sisters, and a little lather
A rewardingly meaty, realist family drama, “The Hills of California” nonetheless tiptoes on the edge of pastiche. Lightly pinching from the likes of “Gypsy,” “Mildred Pierce,” Arthur Miller, and John Osborne, playwright Butterworth (“Jerusalem,” “The Ferryman”) manages to keep things just south of soapy.

He gets major support in this effort from director Loretta Greco, the artistic director of Boston’s Huntington Theatre, Berkeley Rep’s production partner on this show. Greco, who formerly helmed San Francisco’s Magic Theatre, draws performances from her cast that, for the most part, vibrate with pained emotional restraint at moments that could easily erupt into melodramatic excess.

Played as teens and tweens by a different quartet of actresses than play their older selves, sisters Ruby (Chloé Kolbenheyer/Aimee Doherty), Gloria (Meghan Carey/Amanda Kristin Nichols), Jillian (Nicole Mulready/Karen Killeen), and Joan (Kate Fitzgerald/Allison Jean White), the sisters find themselves aswim in a mystery of family history: What was it that ended their ambitious girl group and their harmonious girlhood?

By the time they’re grown women, Ruby and Gloria mothering unhappy families of their own; Jillian mired in elder care and old maid martyrdom; and Joan, at once the most successful and most misunderstood, their individual perspectives, the passage of time, and the licking of wounds have made precise recollection impossible.

Even audience members, who bear witness to betrayals that some of the sisters are blind to, are forced to wrestle with motivations that may have only existed in the subconscious of a teenager but lead to very real rupture in adulthood.

Casting coups and challenges
Allison Jean White plays both eldest daughter Joan, who left home for California and fleeting success as a solo act, and stage mother Veronica. Sharply drawn and instantly distinguishable from each other (Jennifer Von Mayrhauser’s period costumes smartly underscore their differences), these two characters, while long estranged, share traits and desires that we come to see have inadvertently undermined the entire family’s sense of connection.

While this central dual-role casting is mandated by Butterworth’s script, there’s relatively little exploration of their psychological intertwinement, as the playwright wrangles a huge cast of characters. There are another dozen parts beyond the Webb women, played by five additional actors.

They all bring a lively specificity to their smaller roles, particularly Lewis Wheeler in his turn as oleaginous talent manager and Mike Masters, who embodies lifelong family friend and pianist Joe Fogg with a touching blend of good humor and heartbreak.

The pairings of actors as the four sisters at different ages is less successful, though. The manner and physiognomy of the youngsters don’t align clearly enough with their adult counterparts. Across the first few rotations of Andrew Boyce and Se Hyun Oh’s magnificent time and space-shifting set, it’s a bit confusing to determine who’s who.

There’s a particularly problematic mismatch between the two Glorias. Carey’s awkward youthful enthusiasm and Nichols’ coruscating middle-age rage are both vivid and memorable, but disbelief requires excessive suspension in order to hold them in mind as the same character.

Overall, though, this is an evening of smart, solid, fully engaging entertainment. Regular Berkeley Rep-goers will recognize “The Hills of California” as an old-fashioned cousin of last season’s more contemporary family drama with music, “The Cult of Love.”

There’s a Turner Classic comfort to its dysfunctional familiarity.

‘The Hills of California,’ through December 7. $25-$135. 2025 Addison St., Berkeley.
http://www.berkeleyrep.org