There is special providence in building a family band.
There have been many — from the Beach Boys to the Pointer Sisters, Lennon Sisters and McGuire Sisters, among others. Yet before all of them existed, three sisters named LaVerne, Maxene and Patty took American by storm during the World War II era, known to the masses as the Andrews Sisters.
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In Jez Butterworth’s sweeping epic “The Hills of California,” running at Berkeley Repertory Theatre through Dec. 7, the stern taskmaster Veronica has a vision for her four daughters to reach immortal fame. The Andrews Sisters are her blueprint, the group that ruled the 1940s with hits such as “Beer Barrel Polka” and “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” yet didn’t make it out of the early 1950s.
It was in the mid-1950s when the play’s singing siblings, “The Webb Sisters,” were ready to take the musical baton and run with it. But Veronica’s cruelty had left lasting damage on the daughters, and in the play’s latter setting of 1976, the four daughters reunite as their mother lies dying in the guesthouse she ran for many, many decades. That meeting brings up old wounds, along with a reckoning of what each of the daughter’s lives has become.
Director Loretta Greco has many entryways into the story. For one, she is the eldest of five sisters. And like the Webb sisters, Greco knows the various rituals that come with processing a parent passing.
“It was interesting to me how slippery the truth is and how one person’s trauma can be carried by another, as well as how one person’s joy and accomplishment can be carried by another,” said Greco, who served as artistic director of San Francisco’s Magic Theatre for 12 years before moving to same position at Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company. “How personal and slippery truth can be is what the play is exploring.”
When it comes to Veronica Webb, there is quite a bit of nuance, even though she is a problematic mother on the surface.
“She’s not just ambitious, but is also trying to be a great mom and do right by her girls,” said Greco, who is directing only the second production of the show that began in London and transferred to Broadway in 2024. “Her girls are all very different, and them coming together for this homecoming is incredible.”
Allison Jean White understands both the personal and fictional art of the homecoming. White is tasked with playing not just Veronica, but Veronica’s estranged daughter Joan, who built a recording career in the United States and has mysteriously returned to her family home in the English town of Blackpool as her mother begins to pass.
Doing a show in Berkeley is a Bay Area homecoming for White, who is based in New York, but grew up in Menlo Park and attended graduate school at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. To return home and play the role with Greco as the play’s steward and champion was made even more special because of Greco’s personal experiences.
“I knew she was a mom of a daughter, but learning she was one of five sisters was really cool,” said White, who last worked with Greco in “Realistic Joneses” at the Magic in 2016. “It was wonderful to know she was bringing all that richness to this play. While the playwright wrote these female characters and relationships which are so rich to inhabit, it is wonderful to know the director herself had personally lived those relationships, another reason to easily trust her vision and exploration of the text.”
For White, that text is built for two distinct characters, originally written by Butterworth for his partner Laura Donnelly. While intentions are different, there’s also logistical things that encompass every aspect of White’s characterization.
“I have everything to help me make the characters different inside the different time periods,” White said. “There are different wigs, clothes, accents but all still related to the same family. And that’s kind of fun, the fact that I am literally the same body, playing both which brings that connection.”
While Greco’s days at the Magic are behind her, there are still pieces of the lore that have stayed with her, namely the Magic’s connection to arguably its greatest resident playwright Sam Shepard. Butterworth’s homecoming play is now on par with Shepard’s “Buried Child,” or Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming,” but one that fully focuses on women.
“Jez’s writing is so muscular and delicious, and we are just so used to his plays being centered on men,” Greco said. “There’s something inherently powerful about the way he actively and muscularly has the past speak to the present without any reflective nuance or sepia tone or sort of burnt around the edges. The past is active, and is speaking and colliding directly with the present.”
David John Chávez is chair of the American Theatre Critics/Journalists Association and a two-time juror for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (‘22-‘23); @davidjchavez.bsky.social.
‘THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA’
By Jez Butterworth, presented by Berkeley Repertory Theatre in co-production with the Huntington Theatre Company
Through: Dec. 7
Where: Berkeley Rep Roda Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley
Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes, with an intermission
Tickets: $24-$137; berkeleyrep.org
