Pictures from Home
Sharr White
Marin Theatre
There is that box in your closet that you know is there but have not opened in years — a box crammed with family photos and a history of beach, holiday, dress-up, and back-yard poses. What memories lie there ready to reveal stories you have forgotten or relationships you have not resolved? How much reality is actually captured versus myths that the stills perpetuate about a past that never was?
In a garage’s box covered “in dust and rat turds” discovered in his parents’ garage, university professor and professional photographer Larry Sultan finds in 1982 hundreds of Super 8 film clips from which he begins painstakingly extracting frame-by-frame a pictorial history of his family. Over the next ten years, he travels once or twice a month from his home in the Bay Area to his parents’ San Fernando Valley home, creating an ongoing, current montage of them and their lives while also relentlessly interviewing them on a tape deck, seeking to find answers to questions like those above. How much truth lies in the films, photos, and thus his memories of his younger parents when compared to the parents that are now entering their seventies? What can he learn about them and maybe about himself?
Larry Sultan’s resulting 1992 book, Pictures from Home, became his defining work and led to his global fame as a great photographic documentarian in a work that combines family, societal, and artistic themes and questions all tangled together. In his 2023 premiering play by the same name as the seminal book, Sharr White provides a slice-of-life glimpse beginning in the eighth year of those frequent visits by Larry to photograph and interview Irving and Jean. Now in a West Coast premiere at Marin Theatre under the sensitive, sparkling, and sure-fired direction of Jonathan Moscone, White’s Pictures from Home is an emotionally rich, totally engaging, and intensely intimate family portrait that is also both hard-hitting and hilarious as a son seeks to unravel truth from fiction about his parents and about himself.
Larry’s visits home are to a nostalgic setting created lovingly and meticulously by set designer Kate Noll — a Southern California home of the early ’80s that reaps with the hues, touches, memories, and flavors of several decades of family life. We see multiple rooms that speak of economic comfort but not extravagance, rooms that look onto a well-tended garden and a back-yard patio with much-used grill. Lighting by co-designers Russell Champa and Charlie Mejia help create real-time photos of moments we watch occurring while the sound design and musical compositions of Cliff Caruthers provide a subtle, underlying score for transitions of scenes and events. Costumes by Meg Neville place us in the ’80s as well as sometimes in the both the tenderness and the humor of scenes we witness.
As Larry begins to give us some background into the project he believes “will become one of my hallmark achievements,” he and his listening Dad, Irving, immediately begin to spar. Larry says the project “isn’t about me, it’s about them,” to which Irving retorts to us with a half-snicker, “Trust me, it’s about him.” Larry notes he has been coming down to the home he grew up in “every few months” while Irving reacts as if in utter disbelief, “It’s almost every weekend.” And thus begins an ongoing battle of wits, pokes, and near outright punches between these two, with their looking often to us as if we were referees whose role is to declare a winner. While Larry tells his Dad that he hopes the result of all these visits of inquiry and photo-taking will be a book, Irving with rolling eyes cannot fathom what kind it could be ever be — “a novel,” “a biography” — and it is totally beyond him why anyone would ever buy such a book, whatever it is.
In Irving’s view, these visits are like “he’s investigating us,” during which “he picks, picks, picks.” To such frequent, irritated accusations, Larry’s rather vague responses to what he is really doing tend only flame Irv’s fire — responses like “getting to know a different version of you” or “looking for the life beyond the frame … a metaphor.” An answer like the latter is enough to start one of many raised-voice debates between the two on a life-important topic — this time on the definition of “metaphor,” with each acting of course as the world’s expert on the subject at hand. Other times, the heated battle might be over whether the burgers to be grilled should contain onions or Worcestershire sauce — you know, important things like that.
Victor Talmadge is a slam-dunk winner as Irving Sultan. Given his wide range of acerbic tones; his plethora of facial expressions and purposeful poses that resound with shock, snide, and/or superiority; and yet his ability to let Irv’s heart shine through even as he is railing and ranting, it seems that every line Sharr White has given Irving has provided Victor Talmadge the opportunity to draw anything from a chuckle to a loud guffaw from us as audience.
As Larry tries to take a few, candid shots of his dad, Irving keeps catching him in the act and hilariously strikes a noble pose — just the opposite of course what Larry wants. Theirs is an ongoing cat-and-mouse caper, with each trying to out-maneuver the other. Needless to say, Talmadge’s Irving is usually the winner to our delight and to Larry’s frustration.
Dan Cantor is equally cast brilliantly as the son who is on a dedicated mission that is quite beyond him to describe in terms exact enough for his parents’ or even for his own satisfaction. As Larry interacts with his parents, we watch this grown man wander through his own lifespan of a pouting child feeling hurt, a defiant teenager not about to back down even if his own logic is convoluted, or a son who is suddenly coming to grips his parents will not always be here with him.
His Larry sometimes tentatively, sometimes tenaciously pushes boundaries that even he seems not sure where the journey is leading. Pictures of his father as he once was as a successful VP of Schick or as a muscled guy in the pool are contrasted with him as an older man swinging indoors a golf club in his shorts in front of a TV or of his elderly but distinguished dad sitting on a bed in his suit, looking somewhat lost, even melancholy. Cantor’s Larry tries in vain to get his dad to look at the truth of who he was and of who he is now while at the same time we get the feeling that Larry is actually searching who he himself is or is in the process of becoming.
Part of what Larry is also trying to understand is the truth about the relationship between his parents — a couple that are themselves seemingly in a constant tug-of-war of wills or ever erupting into an outright WW III. As Jean, Susan Koozin is the third leg of his very solid, accomplished cast — a highly successful realtor who has continued working since her husband was either laid off or fired fourteen years ago, “it depends on what point he wants to make.”
To counter Irving’s frequent “silent treatments,” Jean is in constant aflutter about her current clients, about where she could have possibly left her glasses, or what she must next put on the to-do list that she can never then find. Jean is somewhat more tolerant and forgiving of her son’s probings and certainly of the visits she is glad he is making; and while she has been told “Larry’s a very important photographer, whatever that means,” she admits, “I’d just like a a couple of nice pictures for the fridge.” Susan Koozin’s Jean is a beautiful mixture of tolerance and understanding of both a grown son and a husband who are often more like spoiled children. Her Jean is also clearly the solid foundation that both husband and son in the end so depend.
As memories are elicited or points are made in arguments, one of the three family members often breaks the fourth wall and asks an unseen projectionist to pull up a certain film clip or a photo to be shown on a screen that both they and we frequently look at– all part of the actual ones Larry Sultan either discovered in the garage or took during those ten years of frequent visits. Two photos are sometimes asked to be placed in juxtaposition as Larry tries — usually to no avail — to get particularly his father to admit that there is much more hidden in those old photos than just a moment’s reality when they are placed next to a more recent one. Larry is searching for answers to questions his father is reluctant to even acknowledge are legitimate, but the exploration — however fruitful or not — becomes a bountiful opportunity for the deep love of a family to become ever more evident. As Irving tells his son, “Being alive … it’s messy …it’s intimacy …This mess? It’s love.”
And that is the beauty and the power of both Sharr White’s enthralling script and Jonathan Moscone’s sensitive yet probing direction of this stellar triad of actors: Family history and the truth about relationships can be both fact and fiction at the same time; and for all the resulting messiness, enduring love is still possible. Marin Theatre’s Pictures from Home becomes for us as audience an album full of possible rich insights about our own family messiness and a confirmation of the love we feel for people that we may not altogether like or understand one hundred per cent of the time.
Rating: 5 E
A Theatre Eddys Best Bet Production
Pictures from Home continues through May 31, 2026, in a one-hour, forty-minute (no intermission) production by Marin Theatre, 397 Miller Avenue, Mill Valley, CA. Tickets are available online at https://www.marintheatre.org/, by phone 415-388-5208 12 p.m.-5 p.m. between performances, and by email at boxoffice@marintheatre.org.
Photo Credits: David Allen
