Dear Theatergoer,

The Hills of California started with a spider.

One day a few years ago, before I’d begun working on the play, I was thinking about what I wanted to write about next, and there in the doorway of my house, I spotted a spider. It was hard at work building its web, the sun illuminating each sinewy strand it had labored upon for who knows how long. It was blissfully unaware, however, that my dog was going to come running through that doorway from his walk any minute and just smash the whole thing to bits.

The notion of putting so much work—so much of your heart—into something, only to have it destroyed in an instant stayed with me as I started on Hills, which is not about a spider but rather a set of four sisters and their mother who’d do anything for them, perhaps at a perilous cost.

I can only write something when I know it’s true, and it’s clear that my plays are starting to obey the Tennessee Williams law, which is to say the plays I write add up to an emotional autobiography. That is very true of Hills, which is not literally true to my life, but is autobiographical in a more metaphorical sense.

I was one of five kids growing up so if you wanted attention, your material had to be good. Plays are like that, too: they need to breathe in and breathe out and then in the next 20 seconds, someone’s got to laugh. Hills is the newest member of my family, and I am thrilled to now be bringing this show to New York following our run in London. As a boy who grew up in rural England, Broadway is still the most thrilling, highest peak, and I do hope you’ll join us in the coming weeks at the Broadhurst Theatre.

– Jez Butterworth