Exploring Relationships, Parents and Success in “Pictures From Home”
Photo by Julieta Cervantes
The Spring 2023 Broadway season kicks off this week at Studio 54 with a touching tribute to the messy, complicated and beautiful relationships between parents and their children.
Inspired by Larry Sultan’s photo memoir of his aging parents, “Pictures From Home” tells the story of how Sultan crafted his deeply personal memoir through eight years of photographing and observing the surroundings, marriage and lives of his retired father Irving and semi-retired mother Jean. The show is nearly perfect in its construction and presentation, and it’s one not to be missed or overlooked by theater-goers this spring.
The story of Sultan’s work vividly illuminates the differing expectations and passions that complicated his relationship with his parents. Neither parent, particularly Irving, is able to reconcile Sultan’s passion and patience for photography as a profession with their lives of success as a salesman and a real estate broker. “Who can afford hopes and dreams?” Irving asks his son while posing for one of Sultan’s many photos.
“Pictures From Home” is a love letter from a son to the two people that frustrate him endlessly, but whom he loves more than anything—his parents. Although the three people who lived the true story behind the work have passed away, their shared bond of love is remarkably alive and current on the stage.
But writer Sharr White doesn’t shy away from the messiness of their love: the story of the Sultans also exposes the raw consequences of spending one’s life posturing a fiction of success and contentment while struggling with insecurity and feelings of inadequacy. These decisions don’t just affect Jean and Irving individually. They infect their marriage and relationship with their son and as we learn through the evening, these problems take real work and discomfort to overcome.
Directed by Bartlett Sher, “Pictures From Home” is a tour-de-force in almost every aspect of the production. The deliberate use of silence and open space in the set, lighting and sound (scenic design by Michael Yeargan, lighting design by Jennifer Tipton and sound design by Scott Lehrer and Peter John Still) adds to the emotional impact of the story. This concept of emptiness creates profound opportunities for the show’s three dynamic actors to build characters who both dominate the empty space and find themselves vulnerable and exposed within it.
The award-winning theater legend Nathan Lane returns to Broadway as Irving. Lane brilliantly captures the character’s stubborn, Reaganesque approach to career, family and life. Zoë Wanamaker compliments Lane’s performance as his wife Jean, a role that initially languishes next to Lane’s performance but transforms into a powerful, dynamic role as the evening progresses.
The best performance of the show, however, is Danny Burnstein’s portrayal of Larry Sultan, a middle-aged man comfortable with his career and family but continually searching for a deeper meaning to his relationships through photography and interviews with his parents.
Burnstein’s Sultan is intent on asking his audience difficult questions about the characters in his memoir, the people behind the pictures and what their different successes and failures as imperfect people imply for the rest of us. In the show’s final scene, Sultan tearfully confesses to his mother, “I just want you both to live forever… Maybe by continuing to take pictures of you, I thought I could stop time.”
“I don’t want to live forever,” his mother responds. “Eventually we just have to go.”
“Pictures From Home” is currently running at Studio 54 through April 30, 2023.
Eli Johnson is the Theatre Columnist for the Empire State Tribune. He is a sophomore at The King's College majoring in Business. He is an avid theatre-goer and always enjoys a game of chess.