Playwright captures images of a family in FST’s ‘Pictures from Home’ in regional premiere

Sharr White was on the writing staff of the Showtime series “The Affair” in 2015, feeling “stuck in L.A. and pretty miserable” when a friend invited him to see a retrospective of work by photographer Larry Sultan.

It included photographs from Sultan’s “Pictures from Home,” featuring images he had taken of his parents over 10 years from about 1982 to 1992 that was intended as a kind of a family portrait, but became something more. The exhibit featured text on the walls conveying conversations about who owned the images. “Your photograph. My image,” the father, Irv, is seen saying.

White was taken with the dismissive and probing nature of “Irv’s attack on his son, or the tact he took. I looked at the images and wondered ‘Who are these guys and what is this project?’ I wanted to know everything.”

He did more than that. He turned a photo exhibit and a book into the play “Pictures from Home,” which opens Friday at Florida Studio Theatre.

The play had its Broadway premiere earlier this year, following White’s previous plays “The Snow Geese” and “The Other Place.” In addition to “The Affair,” he was the showrunner for the HBO series “Halston” and a writer/producer on the HBO Max series “Generation.”

In a Zoom interview, White said he was fascinated with the question of ownership, and before delving into writing what would become “Pictures from Home,” he had to win approval from Sultan’s estate.

“Before he died he appointed a group of friends as his sort of artistic trust. I met all of them. It was very nerve wracking meeting his friends, who are all incredible artists in their own right,” White said. “We spent a lot of time talking about Larry’s process. There is so much about interpretation in his work at the core of it. He was all about the fact that many truths can occur at the same time. Many interpretations can happen at the same time and all of them are true. This is my interpretation of Larry’s interpretation of his parents, which is interpreted by the actors, which is interpreted by the audience.”

On Broadway, the play featured Nathan Lane and Zoe Wanamaker as the parents, Irving and Jean Sultan, and Danny Burstein as Larry. At Florida Studio Theatre, Kate Alexander directs a cast that features three returning actors: Gil Brady as Larry, Kraig Swartz as Irving and Jean Tafler as Jean.

A Sarasota premiere

Brady has appeared in more than 10 FST productions, most recently last summer’s revival of “Shear Madness.” Swartz was featured in “Visit Joe Whitefeather (and bring the family),” “Something Rotten” and “The Legend of Georgia McBride.” Tafler was in the 2016 production of “Alabama Story.”

Richard Hopkins, the theater’s producing artistic director, said, “You get to see this suburban family – a mother, a father and their adult son – and get to know them in a deeply personal way.”

White said the play is not a biography, even if it tells some version of a family’s story.

“At a certain point, you have to make them start walking and talking in the room, which is up to you. There are certain conversations I took from the book,” he said. But the playwright also began to delve into the nature of Larry’s relationship with his parents in ways not shared in the book.

“I set the characters up so they’re arguing about the photographs in the book, using the audience as their adjudicator. My interpretation within that is to take what I know within this Freudian relationship and apply that to the photographs I’m seeing and have them argue their points.”

The Washington Post described the play “as a kind of seminar on the trials of an artist, maintaining his professional composure while working through his rawest feelings about his subjects.”

White said his talks with Larry’s widow, Kelly Sultan, allowed him “to create my interpretation of his work.”

He didn’t want to write a standard artist biography exploring the life and work of a genius, as John Logan did in “Red” about the artist Mark Rothko.

“I wanted an exploration of someone who’s saying ‘I don’t know what I have.’ He says from the beginning, he thought this was about his father, a reaction to Reaganism, a story about a man whose sense of everything had been discord. As the play goes along, it becomes something else. As Larry gets married, he becomes a father, he ages, his parents age. It becomes an exploration of mortality. He didn’t set out to do that, it was only through this mammoth years-long effort.”

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Writing for stage and TV

White wrote the play while also working on television projects.

“I love switching to a different, more visual, medium, telling the story in a different way. It itches a part of the brain that’s exciting. Telling a story in pictures, you have a much more expandable palette.”

But in the end, writing for television is not much different than for the stage. “Ultimately, I’m a structuralist and structure is structure, and over 10 episodes, you’re using that sort of theater structure to dig into the story. They’re very complementary.”

‘Pictures From Home’

By Sharr White. Directed by Kate Alexander. Runs Dec. 13-Feb. 18. Florida Studio Theatre Keating Theatre, 1241 N. Palm Ave., Sarasota. Tickets are $25-$39. 941-366-9000; floridastudiotheatre.org

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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Area premiere of ‘Pictures from Home’ tells a story of family conflict