INTERVIEW: Playwright Sharr White offers snapshot of Larry Sultan’s ‘Pictures’
Photo: Pictures From Home stars, from left, Danny Burstein, Zoë Wanamaker and Nathan Lane. Photo courtesy of Julieta Cervantes / Provided by Polk & Co. with permission.
Pictures From Home, the new Broadway play running at Studio 54, features an A-list of theatrical talent. Nathan Lane portrays Irving, a retired business professional trying to adapt to life at home. Zoë Wanamaker plays Jean, Irving’s wife and a local real estate agent. They are frequently visited by their son, Larry (Danny Burstein), a professional photographer who has decided to document his parents’ private life, including their aspirations and vulnerabilities.
The play comes to New York City courtesy of Sharr White, perhaps best known for Broadway’s The Other Place with Laurie Metcalf and The Snow Geese with Mary Louise Parker. He’s also been a TV writer for years, working on such projects as The Affair, Sweetbitter and Halston. What makes his telling of this new theatrical story so unique is the source material he pulls from. Irving, Jean and Larry are not fictional creations; they were a real family, and the photographic work at the center of the narrative was actually made into a landmark book that changed the field of contemporary photography.
“I was in L.A. in 2015, and I was shooting a season of The Affair,” White said in a recent phone interview. “A friend of mine said, ‘You have to go see this photographer’s work at LACMA, the L.A. County Museum of Art.’ And so I went with her, and there was this Larry Sultan retrospective, which was extraordinary. Of course, what really grabbed me was this section of the retrospective which was devoted to Pictures From Home. There was quite a lot of text on the wall, this really intense engagement between Larry and his father, Irv, and, you know, there was such a profound rejection and acceptance at the same time in this really intense conversation depicted. And I just thought I wanted to know everything about this relationship.”
White left the art exhibition in Los Angeles and almost immediately bought Sultan’s original photographic book. He also bought the exhibition catalogue, called Larry Sultan: Here and Home, and he dove in to the storytelling. Eventually he realized there was a play percolating in his mind, but he was at a crossroads on what to do next.
“I didn’t know where to start or what the focus should be,” he said. “I sort of got cold feet because I knew ultimately I was probably going to have to approach the estate, and once you approach an estate and they say no, you really can’t do anything.”
The real-life people depicted in White’s play are now deceased, but their memories live on thanks to Sultan’s photography, which is strikingly intimate and familiarly familial. There is a documentarian’s detail throughout the work, but there’s also depicted resistance to be photographed, especially on the part of Irving. Larry would like to set up a shot one way, while his father doesn’t understand the artistic process and believes his son is spending too much time on the minute details. This tug-of-war becomes a central part of Pictures From Home on Broadway.
“So I knew it was not something that I could fictionalize because I wanted to use the photographs,” White said. “And I stalled for a couple years while I sort of worked up the nerve to contact the estate, and I finally did. It was Larry’s widow, Kelly. We had an email exchange, and then I had a couple long conversations with her. And finally I visited her in their home in northern California, and that just became a running conversation. She pledged the full support of the estate, which was amazing, but then [we had] these really in-depth conversations about how Larry worked and what the process was like and who Irv and Jean really were and what the relationship was like and what he really was mining.”
In the play, which is directed by Bartlett Sher, the characters often break the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience. In these passages, Larry further explains his artistic process, while his parents offer their own takes on whether this project is worth their time. Through their testimonials, the audience learns about their passions and strengths, fears and frailties.
“Breaking the fourth wall really came first,” White said. “I really wanted it to be these three people from the get-go enlisting the audience on their point of view, and I felt like their voices are so strong, their opinions are so strong, throughout the book and then also with my discussions with Kelly. Larry’s work is so interpretational, and his parents’ interpretations of his work was so important to this piece in particular. And so I wanted their interpretations to all be coming at us at the same time, this running argument about ownership of image.”
In the development of the play, Kelly Sultan offered some videos of Larry and his parents, but White decided to hold off on viewing them. The playwright wanted to capture these three people based solely on the photographs and the text in Sultan’s book. As White put it, he didn’t want to produce a piece of documentary theater, so he decided to only view the videos much later in the process.
“I needed to be able to make the three of them walk and talk in my imagination and sort of have my own ownership of them first,” he said. “Irv very clearly objects to Larry depicting Jean as old and him as old. Larry very clearly objects to his father posing his mother like a model, and so they both find a falsity in each other’s images. … A lot of that allowed me to expand on the them more than anything.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Pictures From Home, written by Sharr White, continues on Broadway at Studio 54. The production, directed by Bartlett Sher, stars Nathan Lane, Zoë Wanamaker and Danny Burstein. Click here for more information and tickets.
