NEW YORK — Artists sacrifice their families all the time. And although it sucks to be related to someone, especially a kid, who is using you in their work, or even as their work, the ageist media and cultural establishment generally sniff and stand by the precious artist’s truth.
Parents? Unavoidable collateral damage. Just look at last year’s Tony Award-winning musical, “A Strange Loop.” And that’s just one example.
But the cool thing about playwright Sharr White’s intriguing and rather haunting Broadway play “Pictures From Home,” which stars Nathan Lane, Zoë Wanamaker and Danny Burstein, is that it differs from every other play or musical I’ve seen of late in that it actually gives the family enough ammunition to fight back.
The commercially produced black comedy, which opened last week at Studio 54 in New York under the direction of Bartlett Sher, is drawn from the work of the photographer Larry Sultan (Burstein), who in the 1980s embarked on a project to photograph and interview his aging parents going about their normal lives.
Sultan’s actual photographs provide a backdrop to the show. He had wanted to record his parents and write about them over time, including exploring his own evolving relationship with them.
Larry was already a well-regarded artist. His dad Irving was a razor blade salesman who avoided the fate of Willy Loman and went west to California, doing pretty well. His marriage to realtor Jean (Wanamaker) was a happy one, which is not, of course, to say that their days were filled with bliss.
As presented here in a 1980s domestic milieu cleverly designed by Michael Yeargan, the pair have a Reaganesque quality about them. They love their son and tolerate his project but they are irritated by his obsession with photographing the melancholy in lives that they have found, for the most part, to be satisfactory and happy.
In their minds, he keeps making them look bad. And, in fact he does. He wants to sell his work and well knows that will require a touch of 1980s American Gothic.
So there’s the core conflict: the unexamined life versus the examined one, the dad who works for a living and the son who does speculative projects, the true believers in American exceptionalism and the arty, cynical fils who only got to be that way because his parents worked like hell to put bread on his table. It’s a very timely and contrarian point of view on an important issue.
Here’s an example of what I mean: Larry complains to his dad that all of his photos, especially of his wife have been posed, in the way that almost all domestic Kodachromes of the era were posed, designed to paper over any cracks, flatter the subject, and make life look betters than it was. Who was not guilty of such in the 1980s, even if it now irritates the millennials who constantly want to rip stuff apart?
But Irving doesn’t just complain; he rightly points out that Larry’s award-worthy photos are just as artificial, just as posed, pompous lighting and all, albeit with opposite aims.
Who’s to say Irving’s snaps are not more honest? Who indeed, you think, as you sit and watch.
Lane, whom I struggle to think capable of playing such old age, cannot help but lean into the comedy, given his preternatural ability to find the laugh in every sad or embittered line and, while that spins the work in a certain way, that also has the happy result of enlivening and empowering his character and ratcheting up the stakes of the entire proceedings.
Wanamaker, who is superb in a chronically underwritten role, plays the mediator between father and son, a role that her Jean always has had to play, being a product of her time. Bernstein is certainly emotionally engaged here but I found him to be too passive in places, too inclined to reach for the end of the play and letting Lane wipe the floor with him at times. He needs to better make the young artist’s case.
But given how much our mythologies are based on our collective mortality, the young usually win out, for a while anyway. And though there is a late twist of fate, it seems like it will be no different at all here as Irving and Jean head into the Palm Desert sunset.
“Pictures From Homes” has its bumps and unusual choices and the shared narration is occasionally weird; it’s never entirely clear why the audience is in the living room, if that is where we are. All that you have to look past.
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 forever 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.
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At Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St., New York; picturesfromhomebroadway.com
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