Pictures From Home Broadway Reviews

The play by Sharr White that opened on Thursday at Studio 54, in a production directed by Bartlett Sher, has not made it all the way from two dimensions to three. Though honorable, thoughtful and wonderful to look at, with crafty performances by Danny Burstein, Zoë Wanamaker and especially Nathan Lane, it caulks so many of the book’s expressive cracks that the best thing about it — its mystery — is sealed out.

The play tries to tell what Sultan’s photographs show, and to some extent it succeeds. Because the actors are so appealing, they make for good company: Lane can wring laughs out of any line he wants just by slapping a comic cadence on it, and his restless, carping Irv is an apt foil for Burstein’s tender, reflective Larry; Wanamaker brings wit and spine to a part that is supporting in more ways than one. Director Bartlett Sher frames the play in a spare, asymmetrical physical space-designed by Michael Yeargan and lit by Jennifer Tipton—that helps keep it from seeming too cozy.

Not too long after Pictures From Home gets underway, it turns boring and then abusive to the patrons. Then, if this is the California answer to Arthur Miller’s classic drama, it becomes a piece to which much attention need not be paid. The modicum of attention that might be paid is due to venerable actors Lane, Burstein and Wanamaker. (Lane is top-billed, but Burstein gets the last and therefore most prominent of the separate curtain bows.) Dominating as each can be, they’re hampered by Sharr’s script and Sher’s acquiescing direction.

Pictures from Home proves less artful than the photo book that inspired it, but the universality of its themes and the power of its performances make it pack an emotional punch nonetheless. It would make even more of an impact if it had been housed in a more suitable theater. (Memo to Broadway producers: Studio 54 is not an appropriate venue for small-scale, intimate dramas.)

“Pictures,” directed by Bartlett Sher as an afterthought, is not really a play at all, so much as one guy’s musings about the middle class. It’s a drama-free paraphrase of Sultan’s essays punctuated by Nathan Lane and Zoe Wanamaker, as Irving and Jean respectively, wisecracking about being old. When you occasionally laugh at their jokes, you briefly forget that you’re bored.

While the intimate and honest views of a family’s inner workings can’t help but touch our hearts at steadily paced moments, Pictures From Home is too blunt in its characterizations, with father and son especially, repeating their arguments and complaints with unstoppable frequency. Lane has the toughest job here, having to convince the audience that we don’t know who he really is, that we haven’t seen a version of this guy displayed and portrayed in everything from An American Family to (at its most extreme) Succession. The challenge proves a bit too tough even for the indefatigable and always appealing Lane, whose left to fill the holes with high-volume point-making.

But White, and Sher, and this cast, keeps the focus on the right questions. As Broadway obsesses over youth and revolt, here’s a sweet and wise Broadway play about just wanting your mom and dad to keep on going, to wish they could live for ever and to realize that any artist can complain and roar but some wise ones choose instead to render their loved ones immortal. And the real stars of a starry Broadway show, too. A rare gift, to be wisely used.

The three actors try to wring as many of the laughs and jolting moments from the script as possible. But they are navigating a mostly flaccid narrative which feels like a boring treasure hunt with lots of clues and teases, but ultimately no glinting treasure.

Set in the couple’s San Fernando Valley tract home and showcasing a breadth of Sultan’s real-life family film stills and photographs projected on scenic designer Michael Yeargan’s avocado-colored walls, Pictures From Home stumbles down memory lane rather than strolls, punctuated by three nuanced performances that challenge the meaning and value of family.

Artist Larry Sultan spent 10 years photographing his parents in their southern California home and analysing their home movies for his 1992 photo memoir. Now, playwright Sharr White dramatises Sultan’s efforts in a play of the same name, directed by Bartlett Sher. Frustratingly, whatever complexity Sultan’s memoir holds translates into oversimplified family squabbles in White’s script, and is flattened into diluted comedy by Sher. Yet Nathan Lane and Zoë Wanamaker deliver strong character performances.

When contemplating the talent involved in Broadway’s “Pictures From Home”—a cast comprising Nathan Lane, Danny Burstein and Zoë Wanamaker, under the direction of Bartlett Sher—managing expectations is hard. But necessary. For while the production is impeccable and the performances polished and funny, the play, adapted by Sharr White from Larry Sultan’s memoir-cum-photography book, feels like a snapshot that hasn’t been fully developed, to borrow the handiest simile. Diffuse and sometimes repetitive, it uncomfortably resembles the scrapbook of sorts on which it is based.

Despite their herculean efforts, though, “Pictures from Home” works better as a play to discuss over dinner than a fully engrossing viewer experience. Even as the story’s philosophical queries arise -- sometimes with little warning— it too often feels just like you’re eavesdropping on your neighbors’ banal conversations. Moreover, much of the play is reminiscent of watching someone else’s home movies, which we all know is less fascinating for the viewer than the taker. (And to be clear, you are sometimes doing that literally, as the Sultans’ actual home movies and photographs are projected on the back wall of Michael Yeargan’s uninspiring set.)

The play’s nearly timeless memory-based structure does not help the forward momentum. The characters speak across decades but seem to repeat discoveries from scene to scene across Pictures From Home’s intermission-less hour and 45 minutes. That captures the way that time will blur together when you’re spending time with family, but it blurs the drama too.

But the three Broadway veterans who comprise the entire cast give the play heft. Tony winner Burstein (Moulin Rouge! The Musical) is convincingly brash, letting dad’s insults fly right over him, while hiding an appealing vulnerability. Wanamaker is also terrific, resolutely going about her business and eventually even showing a soft side. And Broadway titan Nathan Lane doesn’t play down to his character, lands every laugh, and has a volcanic explosion late in the play that is brilliantly pulled off. Unfortunately, Irving—who describes himself as a deeply vulnerable person who doesn’t want to be seen as vulnerable—is pretty insufferable company, and director Bartlett Sher lets Lane exacerbate that by screaming so many of his lines. When Irv starts giving Larry the silent treatment out of seething resentment, you’re relieved for his vocal cords.

Throughout the 1980s, the photographer Larry Sultan spent close to a decade photographing his parents at their kitschy home for what would eventually become Pictures From Home, a photo book that evokes the feeling of the American Dream set out to dry in the Southern California sun. Now adapted by Sharr White into a play of the same name, ably directed by Bartlett Sher, these images come to life through a trio of veteran actors, with Danny Burstein in the role of artist as eternal child, and creates an often moving portrait of family as an uncapturable, captivating subject.

Thankfully, Mr. Lane gets to complement, rather than compete with, the scenery in Bartlett Sher’s witty, moving production of “Pictures From Home,” a new play by Sharr White that was adapted from and titled after the late photographer Larry Sultan’s 1992 visual memoir of his aging parents.

Despite its distinctive visual source, the optics generally disappoint. Scenic designer Michael Yeargan’s suburban living-room set and Jennifer Tipton’s lights clutter and flood the broad stage of Studio 54, when they ought to be boxing, isolating, and rotating domestic areas for detailed inspection. Everything looks a bit loud and obvious, as if the elder generation’s kitschy, bright-hued aesthetic were allowed to call the shots. Sultan’s photographs are projected to fill the rear wall, a digital blow-up that does the art a disservice and only underscores the compositional blandness around it. No matter how many millions producers poured into the affair, Broadway stars and a team of designers can’t manifest what Larry Sultan did with his camera: the mystery and grace of people we thought we knew our whole lives.

Under Bartlett Sher’s assured direction, all three actors deftly capture the play’s shifting tones. Burstein shines as Larry, an artist whose work may not always be in his parents’ best interests. Wanamaker’s Jean is happily resigned to her life, but she’s nobody’s fool. Irv, a salesman-turned-executive unceremoniously pushed into retirement, emerges as a fascinating figure. Credit Lane’s depiction that toggles back and forth from funny to poignant in a flash.