As they gather to await the death of their hard-charging, ambitious stage mother, three sisters, and then a fourth, estranged sister, parse through their past in playwright Jez Butterworth's The Hills of California, now playing at Berkeley Rep.

We meet the Webb sisters, one by one, in the opening scene of The Hills of California. Now women approaching middle age who have lived very separate lives, they were once a tightnit quartet, pushed by their mother Veronica to be England's answer to the Andrews Sisters.

Jillian or Jill (Karen Killeen), dressed dowdily, sneaks a cigarette before the nurse attending to her mother comes downstairs from the deathbed. Ruby (Aimee Doherty), has recently arrived and describes losing track of her husband in a drunken fog at the beach the night before, but she's not worried about if or when he'll turn up. Gloria (Amanda Kristin Nichols) arrives in a torrent of anger, slapping and kicking her teenage children, who are punching and wrestling each other. She promptly tells her long-suffering husband Bill (Mike Masters) to go take a walk somewhere.

The year is 1976. The place: Seaview, a guest house in Blackpool, England, with no view to speak of.

We learn that a fourth sister, the eldest, Joan, is flying in from California, and has been delayed. 32-year-old Jill, who has devoted her life so far to taking care of their mother as she descended into alcoholism and subsequently suffered from stomach cancer, is worried that Joan, always mother's favorite, won't arrive in time.

In the Berkeley Rep production which opened Wednesday, the towering set by Andrew Boyce and Se Hyun Oh spins on a turntable to reveal, on the opposite side of the "public parlor" and staircase, the kitchen and private parlor of the Webbs' home, where it is suddenly 1956. We meet Veronica (Allison Jean White) as she once was, a slender, imposing figure in heels, directing her girls in rehearsal before dinner. We meet all four girls as they were twenty years earlier, between about the ages of 12 and 15, singing things like "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" and "The Hills of California" (a Johnny Mercer song from 1948).

The goal, as we soon learn, is to get the Webb Sisters booked on bigger stages, perhaps even the London Palladium. Jack (Kyle Cameron), a long-term tenant in the guest house who is some sort of vaudeville performer himself, tells Veronica that he's met an American booking agent for Perry Como, and maybe they can arrange an audition — and it's on.

Butterworth's play is, in many ways, an old-fashioned one. It's a family drama with brief moments of comedy, and a play in which the present is being constantly intruded upon by the traumas and disappointments of the past. It's not insignificant that Seaside Guest House was always a world of women, though Veronica clearly finds male companionship when she cares to, with Jack and whoever else. (It seems fairly clear that the four girls may all have different fathers, and that Veronica has made up various stories for where their one, fictional father met his end.)

And in parsing those traumas, the play asks questions about how much they matter, and why it can be so difficult for adult siblings to come to grips with the past together, without laying blame, or harboring resentment. By the time Joan (also played by White) makes her appearance in the final scene, dressed in hippie garb like it's still 1969, we've learned most of what we're going to learn about why she stayed away so long, and why Gloria remains so angry about it.

The performances in The Hills of California are, across the board, stellar, with Killeen especially strong as the high-strung and put-upon Jill, and White deftly able to disappear into the characters of both Veronica and Joan — who returns having lost her Blackpool accent and acquired an American one. As Young Joan, Kate Fitzgerald also pulls out a star turn.

Director Loretta Greco, who is well known to Bay Area theater audiences after serving as artistic director of The Magic Theater for over decade, brings this co-production from Boston's Huntington Theatre, where she now works, and where its run just ended last month. And the large cast is directed and choreographed with terrific nuance throughout this complicated, time-spanning play.

Ultimately, the play leaves much unfinished and unanswered in the lives of these women, which is likely by design. The past can never be fully sorted, or satisfyingly understood, especially between siblings who experienced it differently. There is still something to be said for showing up at all, to try.

'The Hills of California' plays through December 7 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Find tickets here.

Top image: Photo by Liza Voll