Jean (left), Irv (center) and Larry discuss old photo of Irv in Pictures from Home. Photo by David Allen.
By WOODY WEINGARTEN
Check out the upscale, retirement-age parents in their San Fernando Valley tract home where the wife’s real estate commissions have kept them afloat for years while the husband’s played golf thrice weekly and continually raged.
In Pictures from Home at the Marin Theatre through May 31, the lives and personalities of the Sultan parents — Irv and Jean — are methodically deconstructed by their demi-adult son, Larry, who frequently sleeps over on weekends after traveling down from Greenbrae. Instead of a stuffed animal, he’s long been caressing a camera and recorder apparently borrowed from the San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts, where he’s been teaching.
All three performers are Equity pros; all three easily bring their real-life characters to life on a cluttered stage set dominated by a large screen onto which still-photo after still-photo extracted from home-movie reels is projected.
Larry, as play’s narrator, has fond memory of portrait of his dad. Photo by David Allen.
Irv, a razor salesman and Schick V.P. who bears only a slight resemblance to everyman Willie Loman and who’s depressed because no one seemingly can afford “hopes and dreams” anymore, firmly believes photos depict events as they are. Larry, the son who’s decidedly more artistic, has spent the last 10 years working on a photo-cum-book project to prove that pictures can show more than bare reality, that they can judiciously recall memories in a way that some might label fiction or exaggeration.
He also acts as the 105-minute, intermission-less, fascinatingly different play’s narrator.
Jean, meanwhile, tries to skirt the ongoing debate, has convinced herself she’s “in charge,” and grumbles that she’d “just like a couple of nice photos for the fridge.”
The one-act Pictures from Home is sprinkled with lots of verbal and physical humor, so much you might think it would be enough to leaven the extremely weighty drama. Not quite.
That’s because what they’re discussing is too personal, too intimate, too raw. It’s visceral rather than cerebral, even when comparing generations.
The problem, if it is any problem, is that playwright Sharr White and director Jonathan Moscone have re-created a family that’s virtually everybody’s, regardless of ethnicity, socio-economic status, or geography. “That was my father up there,” one exiting theatergoer was heard to say.
Dad is played brilliantly by Victor Talmadge as a sad, vulnerable loudmouth who talks over everybody and tries to emasculate his son because he feels powerless himself. Though he appears to lack empathy, he contends that the “key to success is empathy.” Mom, portrayed by Suzan Koosin, flawlessly spends a good part of the play flitting from one edge of the stage to another while trying to get her husband and son to put down their verbal swords. Larry is well-crafted by Dan Cantor as an immature, cowed offspring unlikely ever to grow up.
The dramedy, which is based on a photo memoir by the real Larry Sultan, opened to critical acclaim on Broadway in 2023, with Nathan Hale as Irv.
No matter who’s in the role, though, when Larry’s proposal becomes a reality, Irv neither understands nor accepts the artsy concept and still feels invaded. “I see you’ve got pretty much every photo I don’t like in the book,” he bemoans.
Pictures from Home will run at the Marin Theatre, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley, through May 31. Tickets: $38 to $94, plus a $6 handling fee per total order. Info: 415-388-5208 or www.MarinTheatre.org.
Sherwood “Woody” Weingarten, a longtime voting member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle and the author of four books, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or via his websites,https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitalitypress.com
