“I’m smaller in real life,” Laura Donnelly tells me after I admit that I didn’t recognize her, standing pensively by the entrance to the midtown bar where we’re meeting, scanning the room.
Indeed, the Donnelly who sits before me — diminutive, retiring, her dark hair cut short and in curls — seems far removed from the steely women she has portrayed to towering effect on Broadway. She went fly-fishing with Hugh Jackman, entering the stage while brandishing a freshly caught trout in 2014’s “The River.” She held a sprawling Irish family together while nursing a forbidden attraction to her brother-in-law in 2019’s “The Ferryman.” And she’s currently delivering two commanding performances in “The Hills of California,” playing Veronica, an iron-willed single mother dreaming of fame for her four children, and Joan, the adult daughter who fled for America and took shelter in a rock ’n’ roll lifestyle.
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“Jez always wanted the same actress to play both the child and the parent who had done the damage,” Donnelly explains. By “Jez,” Donnelly is referring to Jez Butterworth, her partner in work and in life — the pair share two children, ages 6 and 8 — and the author of each of her biggest stage successes.
“I’m always telling him, ‘I will never hold it against you if the next one doesn’t have me in it,’” Donnelly says. “I’m not going to be offended if there’s nothing I can play.”
In fact, Butterworth didn’t write to all of Donnelly’s strengths. In “The Hills of California,” Veronica, who hopes to turn her girls into Blackpool’s answer to the Andrews Sisters, plays the piano, something Donnelly had never done. “I became terrified as it began to dawn on me that I’d have to play this instrument in front of an audience,” she says. “But that was a good thing, because I put all my focus on that and didn’t second-guess myself about portraying two very different characters.”
The role of Joan changed dramatically between the play’s West End debut last year and its Broadway run. Butterworth reconceived much of the third act, which centers on Joan’s return to her childhood home, a fading boardinghouse where Veronica is dying of cancer. “Originally, Joan was much more the victim of her circumstances,” Donnelly says. “But Jez wanted her to have more of that spirit of rock defiance.”
The changes meant that Donnelly had to reorient her portrayal of Joan with just a few weeks of rehearsal. “New lines weren’t the problem. It was finding her physicality, tapping into her subconscious, that was the challenge. Once I get that, everything becomes quite natural.”
As for Veronica, when a talent agent agrees to see her daughters’ act, she makes a decision that shatters her family. Donnelly doesn’t absolve Veronica for her choice, but she won’t condemn her either. “I refuse to think of her as a monster, or even a terrible mother,” she says. “She’s put in an impossible situation, and she’s manipulated by someone who has all the power.”
Veronica sees music stardom as the only way out for her daughters — their best chance at a better life. And what of Donnelly? Has she been attracted to fame?
“If you’d asked me that at 17, I’d have said, ‘I want to be a movie star,’” Donnelly admits. “But I’ve known famous people, and I’ve seen how tricky that is. I’d rather be where I am — doing what I love, but I can walk around without being noticed.”
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