The play, written by Sharr White and directed by Bartlett Sher, will also star Danny Burstein and Zoë Wanamaker.
Nathan Lane will return to Broadway this winter, starring in a new play called “Pictures From Home” about the artistic and emotional relationship between a photographer and his aging parents.
The play, written by Sharr White and directed by Bartlett Sher, is adapted from an acclaimed memoir by the photographer Larry Sultan, also called “Pictures From Home,” featuring not only staged portraits of his parents, but also interviews with them.
Danny Burstein, a Tony winner for “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” will play Sultan; Lane, a three-time Tony winner for “Angels in America,” “The Producers” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” will play the photographer’s father, Irving; and Zoë Wanamaker will play the photographer’s mother, Jean.
The Broadway production will be the first for the play, which previously had developmental readings at New York Stage and Film, the Cape Cod Theater Project and the Alley Theater in Houston.
White, whose previous Broadway plays included “The Other Place” and “The Snow Geese,” said he became interested in Sultan after seeing an exhibition of the photographer’s work in Los Angeles, where White was working as a writer and producer of “The Affair.”
“I was totally captivated, and thought, who are these people?” White said. “The more I read, the more I thought it was an epic story and an intimate story, and one that embodies incredible contradictions.”
White described Sultan’s parents as displaying “rejecting acceptance” of their son’s long-running artistic project, which he called “a gorgeous exploration of mortality.” He said the play includes some language from Sultan’s book, and some anecdotes gleaned from interviews with Sultan’s widow, Kelly, but that most of the dialogue was invented by the playwright.
Sher, a Tony winner for his revival of “South Pacific,” has been working on the project for about a year, drawn to it, he said, as “an extraordinary exploration of the aging process.” He said the play “is fundamentally about art — who gets to depict what, and how you’re represented,” and said the production would make heavy use of Sultan’s photography.
Lane, who last appeared on Broadway in 2019, said he had been unfamiliar with Sultan’s work before reading the play, but that he “thought it was a beautiful piece of writing — very funny and very quietly devastating” and said he hoped that its two subjects, “parents and mortality,” would be relatable to audiences.
“It has a documentary feel,” he said, “and yet it’s highly theatrical.”
The play is scheduled to begin previews on Jan. 10 and to open Feb. 9 at Studio 54. Although that theater is owned by the nonprofit Roundabout Theater Company, the play will be a commercial production, with Jeffrey Richards as lead producer.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
