Review: Pictures From Home at Alley Theatre

Larry’s favorite photograph of his dad is the one his father hates the most.

The shot, taken by Larry, a distinguished photographer, is a close-up of his father, Irv, sleeping peacefully on the family’s California living room couch. Through Larry’s eyes, the image captures the vulnerability his father masks in real life. A chance to see the real him without all the masculine confidence Irv swings around daily like his beloved golf club.

But for Irv, the shot is all wrong. He looks old, for one thing. He may be 70 but he sure doesn’t feel it. Plus it’s dimly lit. And who the hell would want to look at a sleeping man anyway, what’s the point? Where’s the rigor in that?

Images, how we see them, how we interpret them, the stories they tell about us and the slippery accuracy of those tales are at the center of Larry and Irv’s prickly father/son relationship in Sharr White’s, Pictures From Home, now getting a handsomely sensitive and whimsical production at the Alley.

Based on the acclaimed 1992 photo memoir of Larry Sultan, the show (developed at the 2020 Alley All New Festival) follows Larry (Zachary Fine) as he leaves his wife and children several times a month to fly to his aging parents’ home for “the project”. A loosely defined photo safari where Larry hopes to capture his parents’ lives accurately through his lens. Certainly, more accurately than the family photos and Super 8 reels he’s seen of them.

Retired executive salesman Irv (Todd Waite) and Larry’s Real Estate Agent mum, Jean (Susan Koozin) may look like the definition of the perfectly successful American nuclear family in snapshot, but Larry doesn’t want the perfect. He wants the people, warts and all. To understand his parents, to better understand himself. To keep his gaze on them, therefore keeping them present and alive.

Set mostly in the 1980s over eight years, we watch Larry drop in and photograph his parents mostly going about their lives, much to his father’s piqued annoyance and mother’s more measured acceptance. All the while, real photos of Larry’s parents are seen projected on screens that drop in and out of the stage. A chance for the characters to discuss and disagree on them.

There’s lots of humor to be mined in their encounters, parents bickering, Larry and Irv seemingly speaking different languages when it comes to expressing feelings and self-truths, Jean trying to keep the peace and her mind in the process.

Director Rob Melrose astutely never lets these funny moments fall prey to tropes. There’s lots of room to laugh here at Irv’s cuss-inflected exasperations, Larry’s endlessly annoying probing questions and Jean’s flappability. But we do so feeling the undercurrent of sadness throughout.

Funny as this family’s miscommunications and inability to provide what the other wants is, we see the frustration underneath. Frustration that they can’t quite be heard. Or access the tools to understand what to say. Or be respected for who they think they are. There’s love there for sure though, otherwise, they wouldn’t keep trying.

It could all be so sentimental, this dance they do. After all, at an hour and forty-five minutes with no intermission, we’re held captive in father and son’s endless and often repetitive arguments over Larry’s work, all the while knowing that “the project” is a commercial success in the end.

What keeps the show fresh for us is the acting. This review could have easily been three words divided only by exclamation points. Zachary! Susan! Todd!

Returning to the Alley, this time without the lizard skin he so superbly sported in Edward Albee’s Seascape, Zachary Fine gives an expressive sweetness to Larry that helps stretch our patience with his neediness and intrusion. Not that what he’s reaching for is wrong or unworthy, it’s just selfish and a little annoying. Yet thanks to Fine’s open-heartedness, we can’t help but root for Larry.

It’s hard to name a production that Susan Koozin doesn’t make better and this is no exception. As Jean, Koozin gets to show off her impeccable comic timing, but it’s her motherly, loving moments that really hit.

“You act as if you’re the only child in the world and we’re the only parents,” she says to Larry trying to persuade him that all children yearn for the understanding he’s desperate for. That Koozin can make this sound both admonishing and assuring is the work of an actor fully driving her character’s emotional bus.

Finally, anyone waiting for Todd Waite to step out of the camp roles and into something meatier, more expansive and demanding – this is your chance and you will not be disappointed. As Irv, Waite is tasked with the heavy lifting in this show and he carries multitudes – abrasiveness, charm, disappointment, self-aggrandizement, self-doubt, jokester and, of course, fatherly judgment.

That we are utterly frustrated by Irv’s immovability/refusal to admit to inner life/mistreatment of his wife and son and yet feel so protective of him is thanks to Waite’s wonderfully nuanced performance.

As Larry’s project winds up, we’re not really sure what he discovered about his parents. That they’re flawed people just like everyone else? Perhaps. There’s no big aha moment here. No satisfying takeaway. Much like life itself, things just move on. The only difference is Larry had photographs to prove it.

Pictures From Home runs to February 11 at Alley Theatre, 615 Texas. For more information, call 713-220-5700 or visit alleytheatre.org. $27-$81.