Running time: One hour and 45 minutes with no intermission. At Studio 54, 254 West 54th St.
What’s fallacious with this picture? Plenty.
“Pictures From Home,” the fatigued latest Broadway play by Sharr White that opened Thursday night at Studio 54, relies on the celebrated photographs the late Larry Sultan took through the years of personal moments between his California mom and pa. Those moving snaps are suffused with sensitivity and vibrant life.
What’s been schlepped to Broadway, nonetheless, is the alternative of a striking still whose subjects entice you with their mystery, conceal a secret behind the eyes and leave you wanting to know more about them. As envisioned theatrically, these are the form of individuals who you want would shut up within the waiting room on the doctor’s office.
“Pictures,” directed by Bartlett Sher as an afterthought, is just not really a play in any respect, a lot as one guy’s musings concerning 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. If you occasionally laugh at their jokes, you briefly forget that you just’re bored.
After discovering lots of of old Super 8 film reels from his West Coast childhood in a closet, photography professor Larry (Danny Burstein) decides to start capturing his mother and father’s day-to-day life through his lens — every banal chore and unflattering nap — to prove that nostalgia for the Fifties is misplaced.
Battering home the purpose, he tells the audience he decided to chronicle his parents’ “American Dream” in the course of the Nineteen Eighties because “resurgent conservatives were fetishizing the image of family.” White’s obnoxious dinner guest of a play, borrowing from the passages in Sultan’s book, is full of academic observations which are insightful to read, but that an individual would never actually say.
When a personality earnestly speaks a sentence just like the “fetishizing the family” comment, they grow to be immediately annoying. Such is the case with poke-and-prod Larry, who loves nothing greater than to criticize the house lives of his poor aging parents.
Larry begins dropping in on them from San Francisco a pair weekends a month together with his camera and lighting equipment to light up their lies: That dad’s corporate success as a razor blade salesman has made him glad; that mom sees her lucrative real estate job as just a little bit hobby somewhat than a bread-winning need; that each have been mad about one another their entire marriage.
They’re annoyed — “It’s like he’s been investigating us!,” mom says — but they humor him. Parents, it seems, enjoy being around their kids.
All three speak on to the audience rather a lot, and make so many asides that they stop being asides and as a substitute grow to be the predominant event. That’s why no scene sizzles — the characters are continually aware of the 1,500 ticket-buyers over there. A lot of the acting comes with a wink.
After a couple of half hour, the story settles into repetitive marital bickering. Larry projects his photos (the actual ones Sultan took) onto Michael Yeargan’s set, which looks just like the first hole at a mini-golf course, and describes them. What’s briefly onscreen is all the time more intriguing than what’s happening onstage, which, to be honest, is an obvious downside to putting on a play about photography.
Despite the fabric’s inherent weaknesses, Lane is powerful as ever as an older and somewhat more contented Willy Loman. He takes his natural comic gregariousness and turns it right into a weapon against anybody who thinks Irving isn’t the apex predator he believes himself to be. How could any person so charming and charismatic by anything lower than top dog?
Wanamaker, alternatively, tends to recede. Whether that’s because she’s up against two supernovas of stage energy, or because Jean herself has settled right into a background existence in her shaky marriage is up for debate. I think it’s a combination of each.
It’s Lane, though, who’s forced to do some heavy lifting to bulk up a skinny show into something watchable. It’s in his performance that “Pictures From Home” shows flashes of promise.
