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Broadway Reviews

Pictures From Home

Theatre Review by Howard Miller - February 9, 2023

Pictures From Home by Sharr White. Based on the photo memoir of the same title by Larry Sultan. Directed by Bartlett Sher. Scenery designed by Michael Yeargan. Costumes designed by Jennifer Moeller. Lighting designed by Jennifer Tipton. Sound designed by Scott Lehrer and Peter John Still. Projections designed by 59 Productions. Wig, hair, and makeup designed by Tommy Kurzman.
Cast: Nathan Lane, Danny Burstein, and Zoë Wanamaker.
Theater: Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street (Between Broadway and 8th Avenue)
Tickets: CriterionTicketing.com


Danny Burstein
Photo by Julieta Cervantes
Playwright Sharr White's Pictures From Home, opening tonight at Studio 54, is a masterful translation to the stage from Larry Sultan's photo memoir of the same title. It is funny when it needs to be (I mean, Nathan Lane, right?), but it is also movingly portrayed by its trio of truly gifted actors and directed by Bartlett Sher with an unerring eye to capturing the complexity of a long marriage, with, to quote Lane's character, all of its "big fat fucking mess" exposed.

How well do we really know our parents? That question would seem to have been the impetus for the real Larry Sultan (played here by Danny Burstein) as he spent close to a decade photographing, interviewing, and trying to understand his frequently bickering, sometimes outright insulting, complicated yet loving parents, his mom Jean (Zoë Wanamaker) and dad Irv (Lane). The play, which often breaks the fourth wall ("You know," Lane says at one point while gesturing toward the audience, "people can hear you when you say that"), is exceptionally strong in the way it captures the intimacy and, ultimately, the vulnerability that defines a long relationship between a pair of strong-willed individuals.

The play (and Larry's quest) begins with some home videos he says he found packed away in his parents' garage at their southern California home in a box covered in "dust and mouse turds." We see footage from these movies along with blowups of photographs from Sultan's book throughout the play. It hardly matters that Sultan's actual parents shown in those photos do not look quite like Wanamaker and Lane. Close enough, and it certainly helps give the play its air of authenticity.


Danny Burstein, Zoë Wanamaker, and Nathan Lane
Photo by Julieta Cervantes
Ostensibly, the rationale for Larry's work with his parents is to create a book and perhaps a museum exhibit. Yet neither Jean nor Irv can imagine why it is that their son keeps showing up, week after week, to take photos of them and to badger them with so many questions. Irv, a retired salesman (you may recognize a bit of Willy Loman in him), measures the value of any professional activity by its monetary worth. He is more than a little puzzled as to the purpose of Larry's seemingly endless project. At one point he asks, in a tone that mixes mockery with a reflection of his own confusion, "as a photographer, I presume one makes money by selling photographs. Right? What are you doing, Larry? You're wasting all your time, all our time, making whatever, art, nobody wants to buy?"

He has a point, does Irv, even if it's not exactly the one that he states. We never fully understand Larry's motivation; the book project almost seems like an excuse for this grown man, one who has a family of his own, to spend so much time with his parents. Why, we wonder along with Jean and Irv, does he neglect his own evidently very patient and supportive wife and children? Why does he ask so many questions of the sort you might expect an adopted child to pose when he finally meets his birth parents?

So, yes. We have the stereotypic image of the man operating the camera hiding behind it, even as his subjects come fully to life. This makes Danny Burstein's role a real challenge to pull off. Yet he effectively serves as the liaison between Larry's parents and the audience, a sort of docent who guides us through the museum of his creative and endlessly curious mind. It is entirely through this interpretive "lens," after all, that we get to know Jean and Irv.

It's hard to imagine any actors who could be better at bringing those two fully to life than Wanamaker and Lane. Look at how Lane stiffens up whenever Larry tries to get his dad to pose for him; the way that Wanamaker shows us that Jean has her own strengths and how easily she is able to match Irv's overbearing demeanor, snark for snark. Yet look, as well, at the depth of the love they still have for one another and for the son they don't really understand. Makes you want to seek out an exhibition of Larry Sultan's photographs and study the real Jean and Irv as if you really do know them, even if it is all a matter of theatrical illusion.