Pictures from Home Review: A Blaringly Unsubtle Family Portrait

Pictures from Home is a frantically verbal adaptation that’s not given to subtlety.

Pictures from Home
Photo: Julieta Cervantes

“I’m looking for the life beyond the frame,” proclaims Larry Sultan (Danny Burstein), the real-life photographer who spent a couple of weekends a month, from 1982 to 1992, visiting his mother and father in the San Fernando Valley, taking thousands of pictures of them in their natural habitat. Why would he do such a thing, leaving his wife and two sons at home while he hung out with Mom and Dad?

That’s the question asked over and over in Sharr White’s dramatic adaptation of Pictures from Home, Sultan’s 1992 photo memoir that pairs his images with written reflections on his childhood and snippets of conversations with his parents about their pasts and the images he was taking of them. Irving (Nathan Lane) and Jean (Zoë Wanamaker) are asking the question themselves, less flattered than perturbed that their son harbors such an obsession with capturing them on camera. For Irving, especially, Larry’s artistic interest in their lives is an affront, a threat to the picture-perfect veneer of the successful businessman that he’s created.

As a study, then, in the ways we present ourselves to the world and the near-impossibility of obtaining a candid shot that truly reflects our real selves, Sultan’s work (he died of cancer in 2009) was astonishingly effective. One photograph that figures prominently in the play, of his elderly father sleeping shirtless on a couch, shudders with the sort of profound depth of a Renaissance portrait. But if Sultan was a master of conveying unspoken multitudes through his images, White—in his frantically verbal adaptation, staged clamorously but statically by Bartlett Sher—often reduces the art to a literal backdrop for family squabbling.

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Photography is a silent medium, conjuring some form of reality but creating infinite space for us to imagine the before and after of the moment frozen in the captured still. But there’s barely a silent or wordless second in Pictures from Home, a play that keeps its characters bickering relentlessly, almost exclusively about Larry’s photographs, until their repetitive arguments start to mush together. And while Sultan’s book does contain text, it’s sparse and selective, with long stretches of full-page photo spreads that suggest a contemplative pacing that the play avoids.

A typically charming edifice of snark, Lane is largely allowed to play up his strengths at banter here, but there isn’t room for the riveting murky depths that he showed as Roy Cohn in Angels in America a few seasons ago. When rage simmers here, the eventual explosions feel too generically mean and too similar to one another to have a sense of climax. Endless exposition tells us so much about who Irving is, and the sort of mid-late-century masculinity that he represents, that Lane isn’t given much space to color in the boldly drawn lines.

Irving is most compelling in the moments when Lane embraces pure physical comedy. When Larry asks his father to recreate an old work presentation for the sake of the camera, Lane keeps striking surreptitious poses, peacockishly unwilling to give up a deep-seated performative image of who he is and how he should display his confidence to the world. It’s one of the few moments, too, where we actually see Larry building his images, the sort of behind-the-scenes glimpse into a photographer’s practice that Pictures from Home seems to promise but seldom delivers. (It’s also unfortunate that the most faithful reenactment of Sultan’s images is scenic designer Michael Yeargan’s replication of one image of wallpaper from Sultan’s photo collection, a sickly pea soup green—“avocado in August,” Yeargan called it in a recent New York Times article by Rebecca Bengal—that doesn’t translate well magnified across the stage.)

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While Jean is disappointingly underwritten, Wanamaker wrings an acerbic tenderness out of what she’s given to work with. Jean’s eventual blow-up at Irving, who’s always treated her late-blooming, wildly successful real estate career as a “hobby,” feels like a well-earned peak for a performance that’s otherwise stuck bubbling beneath the surface.

And while it’s nice to see Burstein in a less showy, more mild-mannered role than his most recent Broadway turns (as Zidler in Moulin Rouge, Doolittle in My Fair Lady, and Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof), he’s also hobbled by the sameness of a character who talks ad infinitum about what he wants from his art but rarely gets to be seen in more varied shades of his humanity. For a play about a man who sacrifices years of just being a son in order to be his parents’ photo-biographer, Pictures from Home seems curiously disinterested in exploring this family, and the conversations they might have, outside of Larry’s photography. (Surely he brought the grandkids to visit once or twice in all those years.)

This, then, isn’t a play given to subtlety. It’s obvious from the first scenes that Larry’s project is a futile quest to prepare himself for his parents’ inevitable passing, maybe even to stave it off through his obsessive preservation of their lives. Yet it takes about 90 minutes for Irving to announce, “Larry, it’s about death,” a moment staged as if it should hit like a revelation.

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We’ve already figured that out long before Pictures from Home reaches this point, and we’ve probably spent much of the time since craning our necks to get a better look at the photographs projected on the back wall of the stage. If only the noisily clashing family trio at the play’s center would occasionally step to the side and let Sultan’s softly stunning work speak for itself.

Pictures from Home is now running at Studio 54.

Dan Rubins

Dan Rubins is a writer, composer, and arts nonprofit leader. He’s also written about theater for CurtainUp, Theatre Is Easy, A Younger Theatre, and the journal Shakespeare. Check out his podcast The Present Stage.

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