Most plays that transfer to New York from London arrive in close to their original form. There might be small changes to the text, to make particular lines comprehensible to American ears, but usually not much more than that.
Laura Donnelly, the star of Jez Butterworth’s new play, “The Hills of California,” knew that the playwright had been planning rewrites since early in the London run, which stretched from January to June this year. The current Broadway engagement at the Broadhurst Theater would give Butterworth the chance.
“He was really excited about that,” Donnelly, 42, said over coffee on a recent morning in Manhattan, her dark hair lightened, permed and cut in a ’70s style for the play. “He kept referring to it as like, ‘little bits here and there,’ and I was like, ‘OK, cool. Yep, no problem.’ I think this is also what he told Sam [Mendes], our director, and told our producers. So they scheduled in two weeks of rehearsals.”
What Butterworth, Donnelly’s partner of nearly a dozen years, had actually ended up doing was a major rewrite of the third act — an overhaul that alters the substance, plot and even meaning of the play.
From the start, Donnelly has portrayed two characters in “The Hills of California”: Veronica Webb, a guesthouse owner in Blackpool, England, in 1955, who is rigorously training her four adolescent daughters to become an American-style girl group; and Joan, her estranged and longed-for favorite child, who returns home at last in 1976, in Act III. But the Joan of the West End script was significantly different from the Joan of the Broadway script.
“I read it, and I burst into tears,” Donnelly said. “Because I was like, I have 10 days. I have 10 days, and I need to create an entirely new character. And that’s very different from creating a character from scratch. It’s more like trying to laser off a tattoo at the same time as you’re trying to put a new one on over the top.”
Do not mistake this for preciousness on Donnelly’s part. For one thing, Leanne Best, who plays Gloria, another of the Webb sisters, cheerfully corroborated the cast’s initial reaction. “I’m not going to lie and say there wasn’t blind panic,” she said.
For another, Donnelly is not some delicate flower. That much is suggested by her résumé of steel-spined roles — like the combative Amalia True in the short-lived HBO series “The Nevers,” the tenacious Jenny Fraser in the Starz series “Outlander” and the stalwart Caitlin Carney in Butterworth’s Tony Award-winning play “The Ferryman,” for which Donnelly won an Olivier Award and got a Tony nomination.
There was, in any case, an unmistakably warm blend of personal affection and professional admiration in Donnelly’s words about Butterworth. While both she and “The Hills of California” were nominated for Oliviers this year, she believes his rewrites have made it “unquestionably better.”
“There is an exhale at the end of this that didn’t exist before,” she said.
Donnelly grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and graduated in 2004 from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She made her Broadway debut a decade ago, opposite Hugh Jackman, in Butterworth’s “The River.”
She was the sole cast member from Ian Rickson’s original 2012 London production to move with the play to New York.
By email, Jackman noted “a timelessness” about Donnelly, but a humor and cheekiness, too; the word that recurred to him was “power.”
“Laura is like a force onstage,” he added. “It’s like her feet go 300 feet into the ground.”
He remembers her as “quietly present” during rehearsals and “patient as an artist.”
“She allowed the character to speak to her, to evolve,” he wrote.
In a video recording of the performance at the New York Public Library, it is impressive to watch her swiftly win over an audience that it is safe to guess had come to see Jackman.
When I mentioned the recording to Donnelly, she lit up instantly. “The River” was the play on which she met Butterworth. They now have two children, ages 6 and 8, who were expected to join their parents in New York just before Sunday’s opening of “The Hills of California.”
Yet serendipity and romance are not the only reasons it still gives Donnelly “mild goose bumps” to think back on “The River” and what she recalls as “an incredibly magical time.”
“It was like the beginning of something,” she said, “the beginning of me really taking my work and my art seriously and giving myself permission to do that and stopping kind of the little voice that came from Belfast in the ’80s, thinking that acting is frivolous or that theater is, you know, in some way just for fun, and that you can’t take yourself too seriously in life or in work.
“I kind of let go of all of that in that time,” she continued. “And that was a lot to do with seeing how seriously Jez took his work and how seriously Ian Rickson took his work. It was like they kind of granted me permission. And in fact, it was kind of the price of entry.”
That, she said, was when she “started feeling like a grown-up in the business.”
Mendes, who previously directed Donnelly in “The Ferryman,” described her by telephone as someone who, unusually, “doesn’t seek to ingratiate herself with the audience.”
“Almost every actor I’ve ever met is giving a performance to two people at the same time,” he said. “One, the actor that they’re acting opposite, and two, the audience. But with Laura, you feel like the audience is eavesdropping, somehow observing this character. And there’s a kind of purity that comes from that.”
OFFSTAGE, DONNELLY IS thoughtful, funny, surprising. When I told her I was furious to be able to locate only the first six of the dozen episodes of “The Nevers,” she said dryly: “I’ll tip you off. Don’t bother with the second six episodes.”
Not what you would usually hear from a show’s star about a job she said she loved: “I was springing out of bed at 5 a.m. every day.” But then “The Nevers” did lose Joss Whedon, its creator, halfway through, at a cliffhanger point in the supernatural, steampunk plot.
The series’ sixth episode, which can still be viewed, had demanded an extraordinary hat trick. In it, Donnelly played a working-class Victorian Londoner named Amalia True, a Canadian soldier from a dystopian future who finds herself inhabiting Amalia’s body, and the Victorian gentlewoman the soldier sets out to remake Amalia into.
“I guess what I came to understand doing that was that I had a range that I had never got to necessarily test out before,” Donnelly said.
So when Butterworth suggested that she play both Veronica and Joan in “The Hills of California,” it seemed to her like something she would have fun investigating.
For his part, Butterworth said by phone that Donnelly’s riffling through those three “Nevers” variations probably had something to do with his wanting to cast her, though of course he was already well aware of her chameleonic prowess.
“When Laura is doing, let’s say, an impersonation of another actor,” he said, “which she does all the time — she’s very good at it, and she’d hate me to tell you that — she does the facial expressions and kind of the bone structure of the people as well. Like, she changes how she looks as well as the voice. It’s a little bit of a party trick, and it’s kind of scary.”
Joan, in “The Hills of California,” is an impeccable mimic, too, having been brought up by Veronica to imitate the voices, movements and styles of the Andrews Sisters.
Donnelly suspects that her own talent at mimicry may stem from having been a child in Belfast during the Troubles, ever alert for a shift of energy in the air.
“I think if you grow up in any sense feeling like you have to be somewhat hypervigilant in order to be safe, then you tap into that ability and you’re watching the micro-expressions of the people around you,” she said.
The legacy of the Troubles inspired “The Ferryman,” in which Donnelly played a woman whose husband has long been disappeared. During the show’s Broadway run, determined to keep the sensations of her role fresh, she read Patrick Radden Keefe’s topically related nonfiction book “Say Nothing.”
Now the book has been adapted into an FX mini-series of the same name, with a Nov. 14 premiere on Hulu. In it Donnelly plays a grown daughter of Jean McConville, a Belfast mother of 10 who was abducted by the Irish Republican Army in 1972, and whose murdered body was not found for more than 30 years.
Donnelly leaped at that role, but a lot of other screen work she is offered seems “very thin in quality,” she said, compared to what she gets to do onstage.
She is wary of accepting a job for the wrong reasons: because it’s flattering to be asked or feels better than not doing anything, or out of anxiety about “being seen to be acting regularly,” she said.
So, as unmoored as she said she feels when she is not working, she has chosen to work less. But lately she has also been trying to figure out who she is outside of work and motherhood, and find ways to use her brain and curiosity when she can’t use them on a role.
The law has long been a fascination of hers; if she hadn’t gotten into drama school when she applied, her plan was to do a year of law school and try again. Riveted these days by live trials on Court TV and YouTube, Donnelly is considering pursuing a law degree — in the kind of at-your-own-pace course that wouldn’t get in the way of her acting.
She says she has no intention of practicing, ever. Or of giving up acting. She just doesn’t want to settle for poor quality, and why would she?
“I’m not thinking in terms of future career,” she said. “This is my career.”
And for the next few months, that means immersing herself in “The Hills of California.” Relearning the play during those two weeks of London rehearsals was “very, very scary,” she said. The danger was that her Broadway performance would be too much in her head, not in her viscera.
Yet in transforming that final act, she said, Butterworth has brought a completeness to a story that before had felt unresolved, and consequently been, for her, “quite difficult to live in.”
“It feels very different doing it on this occasion,” Donnelly said, persuasively. “And I do just think it is the most beautiful rewrite that he could have done.”
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