Review: ‘Pictures From Home’

Sara Krulwich

In a letter from American playwright Sharr White, “beginning in the early 1980’s, Larry Sultan spent ten years photographing, interviewing, and writing about his parents, and his relationship with them. The result was his acclaimed photo memoir, Pictures From Home.” White has now translated the 1992 book into a stage play with direction by Bartlett Sher, opening on Broadway Thursday night at the Studio 54 Theatre.

Pictures From Home is an exploration of the familial bond and how we see our loved ones evolve throughout a lifetime. The play chronologizes Larry Sultan (a curious and clean-shaven Danny Burstein) routinely visiting his parents’ home in the San Fernando Valley of California. He captures sometimes staged, sometimes candid images of his father Irving (a snarky Nathan Lane) and mother Jean (an endearing Zoë Wanamaker) in the midst of their daily routine - much of which is bantering.

Larry meticulously poses his parents to reproduce images of “the American Dream”. Aside from documenting their aging faces, Larry is interested in how the appearance of genuine success differs from the appearance of assumed success. It is, at times, reminiscent of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. How does the meaning of success shift when looking at the image of a glass-ceiling-shattering female realtor versus the headshot of a company’s failing Vice President?

With a cast of three Award-winning actors and a popular director, my expectations going in were certainly elevated. Burstein portrays Larry with a sort of gentle innocence. He would’ve been the type of boy to inspect ants with a magnifying glass for just long enough to study their bodies (instead of burning them alive). Lane and Wanamaker wonderfully embody the older married couple cliché. They know each other’s habits and take turns poking the bear. The trio resembles a family in both physicality and demeanor; complete with pointless squabbling and rare moments of tenderness.

But Wanamaker’s Jean has been neglected by the playwright. Her character is diminished to a third-wheel observer of a father/son relationship, often acting as a referee with one-liners. It’s a shame to see the talents of a remarkable actress I daresay wasted on a character whose been stripped of agency. It’s evident that Jean achieved great success in her life, but a fully nuanced portrayal that honors her accomplishments this is not.

Julieta Cervantes

With the exception of say Theatre of the Absurd, there are two types of conventional plays: one where the characters develop, but the plot is left untouched. Or, one where the circumstances of the plot evolve, but the characters remain unchanged. Pictures From Home fails to do either. White’s dialogue is well-written, yet veers towards repetitive with its 105-minute runtime feeling too long for this story. Family dysfunctionality is both an important and trendy topic of conversation for the theatre, but it’s relied on too heavily here.

In one aside, Larry admits to us that his family is so much more than the mere bickering we’ve seen for an hour or so. He shares that he and his father laugh a great deal of the time. But I can remember only a single moment caused by a dad joke about grilling hamburgers (“get the meat on the heat”) that sends Irving into a fit of laughter. Lane’s laugh is infectious. But otherwise, there’s not much display of this alleged genetic funny bone.

Sher instructs the actors to step in and out of the fourth wall providing their own interpretation of Larry’s work, with Burstein performing a great deal of narration. The play is almost a PowerPoint presentation and some anonymous God-like presence in the rear mezzanine advances the slideshow slides. Larry taught photography for roughly 30 years, so it makes sense to view Pictures From Home as a lecture-styled sequence of flashbacks. But I would have appreciated a distinctive change in either design or staging when Larry travels between the two spaces. The world of this play seems unfinished.

Just when you think you can’t stand to look at those ‘70s green walls and palm-frond-patterned furniture for any longer, Michael Yeargan’s set slowly transforms into an exterior space featuring a barbecue grill and shrubbery. It was a much-needed visual shift that broke up the monotony, reminding us “ah yes, this is the theatre!”

Julieta Cervantes

Larry is framed to be a reliable narrator; his camera grants him the powerful objectivity required to capture moments of authenticity (or even façade) and decipher the emotions behind them. So from the start of the show, there is nothing for Larry to learn thus providing Burstein little work as an actor. His all-knowing superpower is left unthreatened, forcing both actor and character into a stale permanence. Maybe that’s just the curse of a memory play and not a specific critic of Pictures From Home. If a protagonist already knows the trajectory of the story (and doesn’t attempt to conceal anything from the gaze of their audience), is there any room for discovery?

With a play that exists for the sole purpose of analyzing a family dynamic from behind a lens, I found it odd there was little incorporation of Larry’s own family. We hear blurbs about his two young kids (they’re in college by the time the play ends) and we know his wife’s name (Kelly), but we’re offered hardly any glimpse into Larry’s personal life. I hoped White might take some bold artistic liberty, perhaps having Larry reveal a new project featuring photographs of his children and wife as if creating a “Pictures From the Home I Created”. There was a missed opportunity to draw parallels between two families of different generations; a study in how Larry’s approach to parenting was influenced by that of his parents’. I suppose there’s an irony to be found in the story of an artist who gives so much attention to his aging parents that he neglects his own family. I don’t assume that is the reality for Larry Sultan, but it is the brutal impression we’re given regardless.

What the play lacks in catharsis is partly made up in performance. It’s no wonder Lane’s character develops a limp in the second chunk of the play because he carries the production on his back, never fumbling. Even when I had determined that Pictures From Home was unstimulating for me, I still felt tears rolling down my cheeks when Irving’s vulnerability came crumbling out. Lane is a truly marvelous actor who succeeds at his craft here. And it’s not just the appearance of success.