It’s the late 1980s in photographer Larry Sultan’s family’s middle-class tract home in the San Fernando Valley. The carefully placed interior encompasses a living room, bedroom, kitchen, and a peek into the backyard, all proportioned to fit Marin Theatre’s stage in the West Coast premiere of “Pictures from Home.”
In a set design by Kate Noll, a video screen mounted high on the back wall shows photos and home movies of the Sultan family over the years. This is “Larry’s project,” as his puzzled parents explain to the audience.
“It’s like he’s investigating us,” growls Larry’s father Irving, whom we first see in the living room in shorts, wielding a golf club.
The play by Sharr White is a dysfunctional family comedy of sorts, but it’s much more, because it’s true, based on Larry Sultan’s acclaimed 1992 book “Pictures from Home.” The book and the play, as they examine and reexamine old family photos, reveal the inherent kind of tragedy that exists, in one form or another, in all families.
In the time frame of this story, Irving (Victor Talmadge), a former Schick salesman, is unhappily retired. His beleaguered wife Jean (Susan Koozin), a successful real estate agent, somehow withstands her husband’s sulks and temper tantrums.
Larry (Daniel Cantor) has been visiting regularly from his home in the Bay Area to work on this project, interviewing his father about his life, examining the family photos and discovering, or perhaps imagining, all sorts of nuances in them. A professional photographer and teacher of photography, he feels compelled to follow this path.
His parents, who gaze at the photos along with Larry, and, like Larry, talk to the audience as well as to each other, are baffled by it all. Why does he keep coming to their house, leaving his wife and kids at home? What on earth is he getting at?
Irving, a sort of rage-aholic version of Willy Loman, is more than baffled — he’s infuriated. He clings to a gussied-up version of himself in which he’s been a success in life while doing his best to undermine the mild-mannered son whom he sees as feckless. No matter how Larry tries to explain what he’s doing — “I’m looking at life beyond the frame,” he says — his parents simply can’t, or stubbornly won’t, understand.
Larry himself is baffled by his own obsession. “I’m looking for something — inside — that I can’t name or see,” he says. Through the project, confessing to the audience, he’s trying to figure out who he is.
Director Jonathan Moscone knows just how to balance White’s mix of sitcom-style, screaming, hysterical family dynamics with a slower-paced, in fact, existential exploration of the human condition. The final scenes are heartbreaking and worth the wade through some of White’s repetitive earlier scenes.
The talent on display in this stage version of “Pictures from Home” is impressive, from Larry’s real-life published photo memoir to White’s theatrical shaping of that memoir to Moscone’s staging, and to the three excellent actors.
It’s mind-boggling how Talmadge, a longtime Bay Area treasure, sustains an entire performance in which rage and self-delusion almost, but not quite, obliterate fatherly love. Likewise, Koozin’s frenzied Jean (who is not fully revealed until near the end of the play) and Cantor’s Larry are complex, sympathetic characters struggling under the weight of one man’s powerful personality.
“Pictures from Home” continues through May 31 at Marin Theatre, 397 Miller Avenue, Mill Valley. Tickets are $38 to $94 at MarinTheatre.org.