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    How ‘McNeal,’ a Play About A.I., Lured Robert Downey Jr. to Broadway

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    In “McNeal,” the playwright Ayad Akhtar explores the way artificial intelligence is disrupting the literary world and raising questions about creativity.This summer, Ayad Akhtar was struggling with the final scene of “McNeal,” his knotty and disorienting play about a Nobel Prize-winning author who uses artificial intelligence to write a novel.He wanted the title character, played by Robert Downey Jr. in his Broadway debut, to deliver a monologue that sounded like a computer wrote it. So Akhtar uploaded what he had written into ChatGPT, gave the program a list of words, and told it to produce a speech in the style of Shakespeare. The results were so compelling that he read the speech to the cast at the next rehearsal.“Their jaws dropped,” Akhtar said. “It had preserved the speech that I wrote, using those words in such fascinating ways that it was astonishing to everybody there.”Ultimately, Akhtar used only two of the chatbot’s lines. But his attempt to mimic A.I.-generated text — an oddly circular process of a human imitating a computer’s imitation of a human — had an uncanny effect: Downey’s delivery of the final speech feels both intimate and strangely disembodied.“It’s the one secret lie that Ayad tells in the whole play,” Downey said, sitting on the edge of the Vivian Beaumont stage, where he, Akhtar and the play’s director, Bartlett Sher, gathered recently to talk about “McNeal.” “The only thing that isn’t true about this play is that A.I. wrote the final speech.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Robert Downey Jr. Is a Novelist With a Novel Muse in ‘McNeal’

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      The “Oppenheimer” star makes his Broadway debut in Ayad Akhtar’s timely new play about a literary lion who gets assistance from A.I.The Vivian Beaumont Theater has, over the years, been memorably transformed into many specific, even exotic, locales: a Maine carousel, a Thai palace, a South Pacific Seabee base. But never has it looked more exotically nowhere than it does right now, as the setting for Ayad Akhtar’s “McNeal,” a thought experiment about art and A.I. With its softly rounded edges, cool colors and shifting screens, the sleek, vast space is as much an Apple store as a stage.That’s only fitting for a story, set in “the very near future,” in which computer-mediated interactions — predictive chatbots, large language models, generative intelligence — are pitted against their analog forebears. What creative opportunities does such technology afford the artist? What human opportunities does it squander? Forget the sword: It’s the pen vs. the pixel.I’m afraid, alas, the pixel wins, because the play, which opened on Monday, in a stylish Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Bartlett Sher, works only as provocation. Timely but turgid, it rarely rises to drama; in a neat recapitulation of current fears about technology, its humans, hardly credible as such, have been almost entirely replaced by ideas.Certainly Jacob McNeal, played by the formidable Robert Downey Jr., is more a data set than a character. A manly, hard-driving literary novelist of the old school, like Saul Bellow or Philip Roth, he is not at all the magnetic and personable man Akhtar describes in the script; rather, he is whiny, entitled and fatuous. (“At my simple best, I’m a poet,” he says.) About the only time he engages instead of repels is when, in the amusing opening scene, as his doctor (Ruthie Ann Miles) prepares to deliver bad news, he fails to get ChatGPT to tell him his chances of winning the Nobel Prize.“I hope this was helpful,” the bot types.“It was not, you soulless, silicon suck-up,” he replies.We are meant to understand that McNeal is a man who wears his awfulness, in this case his vanity, as an adorable idiosyncrasy, as if it were a feathered hat. He flirts and philanders with equal obliviousness to moral implications. He aggressively asserts his anti-woke bona fides. While being interviewed by a New York Times journalist, who is Black, he asks if she was a “diversity hire.” And when she fails to take the bait, he adds, as a man of his sophistication would know enough not to, “Did I say something wrong?”Downey and Andrea Martin, who portrays a literary agent, in the new play by Ayad Akhtar.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lincoln Center Theater Chooses Lear deBessonet as Artistic Director

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      DeBessonet, currently the artistic director of Encores!, will work alongside Bartlett Sher, who will serve as executive producer.Lincoln Center Theater, a leading nonprofit theater with a long track record of producing luxe Broadway musical revivals as well as contemporary plays, has chosen new leadership for the first time in more than three decades.The theater’s next artistic director will be Lear deBessonet, 44, a stage director who specializes in musical revivals as the artistic director of the Encores! program at New York City Center. DeBessonet will succeed André Bishop, who has led Lincoln Center Theater since 1992, most recently with the title of producing artistic director; he is retiring in June.DeBessonet will work with Bartlett Sher, 65, a Tony-winning director who is a resident director at the organization, and who will now assume the title of executive producer. DeBessonet will select and oversee the theater’s shows and its day-to-day operations; Sher will focus on strategic planning, fund-raising and global partnerships. They will both report to the board’s chairman, Kewsong Lee.In an interview, DeBessonet said that “there is no greater job I can imagine” than running Lincoln Center Theater. “The American theater is the great passion of my life,” she said. “I’ve wanted to be a director and to run a theater since I was a 5-year-old in Baton Rouge.”The changes come amid a tidal wave of turnover throughout the American theater, prompted by a variety of factors, including the retirements of many regional and Off Broadway theater pioneers, as well as the ousters of some leaders who lost support. Across the industry, leaders are facing a new reality: These jobs have become increasingly challenging as nonprofits face rising costs, dwindled audiences, pressures to feature programming that advances social justice but also sells tickets, and changing entertainment consumption habits.Bartlett Sher, who has been directing at Lincoln Center Theater for two decades, will become the nonprofit’s executive producer. Cindy Ord/Getty Images For Tony Awards ProWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Corruption’ Review: Onstage, a Scandal’s Human Drama Is Muffled

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      A new play by J.T. Rogers goes behind the scenes of the shady “news-gathering” that rocked Rupert Murdoch’s British media empire over a decade ago.“Corruption,” J.T. Rogers’s tantalizing new phone-hacking play, starts on Rebekah Brooks’s wedding weekend. In a village in the English countryside, the flame-haired power broker, one of Rupert Murdoch’s favorite tabloid editors, has drawn the cream of Britain’s political class to her celebration.Prime Minister Gordon Brown is there, and so is David Cameron, the Tory who will succeed him. But Brooks (Saffron Burrows) is sequestered in conversation with her charmless boss, Rupert’s son James (Seth Numrich). He informs her that television and new media are the company’s focus now.“Newspapers are a relic,” James says. So his contempt is already evident when he tells her that she is the new chief executive of News International, the Murdoch-owned British newspaper group. Congratulations?It will be on Brooks’s watch, anyway, that a many-tentacled scandal erupts, with the revelation that her journalists clandestinely acquired the voice mail messages not only of celebrities and politicians but also of a missing child who was later found dead. Multiple arrests ensue, with accusations of phone hacking, police corruption and perverting the course of justice. Rupert Murdoch shuts down News of the World, his top-selling Sunday tabloids. Through it all, he remains loyal to Brooks.As a news story evolving in real time, the scandal made for jaw-dropping reading. As a play, though, “Corruption” is uncompelling — counterintuitively so, given the inherent drama: the crimes, the coverup, the comeuppance (or not), the clashes of personality. Also the stakes, which include the well-being of a democracy in which one culture-shaping media magnate holds too much sway.Tom Watson (Toby Stephens), a Labour member of Parliament as the scandal brews, is the central figure. (Murdoch, frequently mentioned, is a looming unseen presence.) Rumpled and besieged, Watson is determined to expose the widespread, under-the-radar operation: the surveillance, the intimidation, the gathering of secrets. The police, in the meantime, are oddly incurious about the voluminous records of a private investigator who they know hacked phones for News of the World.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: The Met’s ‘Roméo et Juliette’ Is Saved by Its Stars

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      Bartlett Sher’s middling production returned to the Metropolitan Opera, with a glorious Benjamin Bernheim and Nadine Sierra in the title roles.Sometimes you just need a few great singers.Two weeks ago at the Metropolitan Opera, a superb cast in “La Forza del Destino” outshone a new, somewhat confused staging by Mariusz Trelinski. And now, Bartlett Sher’s handsome yet unconvincing 2016 production of Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette” has returned to the house with a pair of singers in splendid form.Sher’s staging situates the action on a raised platform surrounded by stone facades and colonnades. Each sharply etched scene from Shakespeare’s tragic romance — the ball, the balcony, the bedroom, the tomb — occurs more or less in a town square.Beautifully lit by Jennifer Tipton and costumed by Catherine Zuber, the production runs out of ideas quickly. But that doesn’t really matter when you have singers on the order of Nadine Sierra and Benjamin Bernheim in the title roles. For an opera steeped in raptures and reveries, in which fantasies of romantic bliss compete with premonitions of a pessimistic outcome, Sierra and Bernheim were a dream at the revival’s second performance on Sunday.Sierra was luscious, lovely and free throughout her range. Although her full, warm voice sounded a tad mature to portray a teenage girl, the disarming generosity of her sound conveyed a trusting, childlike quality. Reluctant and bashful in Act I, with a naturally youthful demeanor, Sierra started Juliette’s waltz with a coy, plain-spoken quality — a bold choice for the opera’s most famous set piece — and rendered the coloratura with a plump tone.Her ripe timbre signaled that she probably would be better suited to the Act IV potion aria, and more than that, she was stupendous. Once again, she began the aria softly. Then it blossomed with Juliette’s fatalistic determination and came to multiple climaxes with a magnificent series of high notes that spun like liquid gold. Daring to glory in her sound, Sierra touched the operatic firmament. The applause went on and on.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In a Sorkinized ‘Camelot,’ That’s How Conditions Are. Alas.

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      A revival of the 1960 musical with the famously great score and infamously bad book gets a gorgeous makeover that makes no difference.About 30 minutes into its 90-minute first act, the Lincoln Center Theater revival of “Camelot” finally wakes up, as if from a pleasant drowse. That’s when Jordan Donica, as Lancelot, who has arrived in England to join King Arthur’s Round Table, tears into the boastful “C’est Moi” like a lion ripping huge bites of dramatic flesh with his teeth.And then, apparently sated, the show, which opened Thursday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, goes back to sleep for another spell, as if this were “Brigadoon.”If only it were! But “Camelot,” the 1960 Lerner and Loewe musical based on T.H. White’s Arthurian tales, has what you might call a post-operetta problem. Neither content to be agreeable piffle nor ready to be Sondheimesque psychodrama, it aims for a middle path, welding Arthur’s romantic life with a free-spirited queen to his rethinking of governance with a recalcitrant gentry. Both fail, as does the show, in a way that “Brigadoon,” the team’s 1947 hit, aiming lower, does not.In “Camelot,” the clever, lightweight style of Lerner’s dialogue, and the show-off triple rhymes of his lyrics, clash with his ambition. They make Loewe’s profoundly polished music, in songs like “I Wonder What the King Is Doing Tonight?” and “The Simple Joys of Maidenhood,” which open the show, come off as charming tea party tunes. Only in flashes does the “serious” part recover, but by then it’s too late. After Lancelot finishes “C’est Moi,” the story goes back to bed for 40 minutes, at last reawakening to the clangs of a thrilling sword fight.Burnap, left, fighting Jordan Donica as Lancelot. Aaron Sorkin could not solve the riddle of the love triangle connecting Guenevere to the boyish Arthur on one side and the hunky Lancelot on the other, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat’s not a problem a rewrite could readily solve, or at any rate it’s not one that Aaron Sorkin did. His revisions for the director Bartlett Sher’s spare-no-expense production — visually and sonically gorgeous — do make some improvements. The silly supernatural subplots have been excised (along with a beautiful song, “Follow Me”) and Guenevere, Arthur’s involuntary queen, has been strengthened with snappy backtalk. She’s now a kind of medieval Katharine Hepburn.But Sorkin cannot solve the riddle of the love triangle connecting Guenevere (Phillipa Soo) to the boyish Arthur (Andrew Burnap) on one side and the hunky Lancelot on the other. The riddle is: When is a triangle a flat line? Because only by rigging up questions of fidelity that make everyone look silly does Lerner’s plot engine turn over at all. Is Arthur still in love with the sorceress Morgan Le Fey, a woman he hasn’t seen since he was 15? Does Guenevere desire Lancelot? Who doesn’t? And why, in any case, should we care?Sorkin tries to shore up Lerner’s droopy stories by rooting the personal conflict in the political and social experiments of the time — or of some time, anyway. The new book, which is set on “the eve of the Enlightenment,” even though that was about a millennium post-Arthur, is not fussy about period. Indeed, it winks at its muddled chronology: “The Middle Ages won’t end by itself,” Arthur says, as if he knew he were middling.The historical backfill is present in White’s and Lerner’s versions, too: The idea of changing a culture of violence to one of justice is at the heart of the story. (It’s the reason Arthur convenes his knights.) The problem is that the musical doesn’t musicalize that, which is why after an hour of brittleness you desperately need the sword fight. (The fight director, still full of surprises, is the great B.H. Barry.) Even the title number, which Sorkin has Guenevere call “that stupid song about the weather,” praises the Camelot revolution in purely sybaritic terms. “The rain may never fall till after sundown” sounds like a boast on Airbnb.Lacking songs to support them, Sorkin’s historical enhancements fall flat. Particularly unconvincing is his sidebar on the evolution of magic into science, with Merlyn (Dakin Matthews, excellent) now a sage, not a wizard, and Morgan (Marilee Talkington) some kind of chemist. (Let’s not even get into Mordred, the mortifying Plot Necessity played by Taylor Trensch.) Forced to maintain the Lerner framework, he can neither justify the romantic story on modern terms nor distract from it in ways that make musical sense.The romance at least gives the principals something to do besides spouting ideas, and gives the audience, especially with Lancelot, something to hear. (After “C’est Moi,” he sings the almost-too-rich “If Ever I Would Leave You” and “I Loved You Once in Silence.”) And though Guenevere mostly gets the tea party numbers, delivered creamily, and Arthur (perhaps in deference to the vocal talents of the role’s originator, Richard Burton) gets almost nothing, both are appealing and play the West Wing of the Castle banter beautifully.Not that there’s a castle. In this, his fifth Golden Age musical revival, and fourth for Lincoln Center Theater, Sher has changed his visual approach. Not so much the costumes, by Jennifer Moeller, which are just as stunning as ever; if you wear velvet gowns or quilted tabards, you’ll want to collect them all. But instead of scenic coups like the orchestra reveal in “South Pacific” and the 52-foot ship in “The King and I,” the set designer Michael Yeargan, the lighting designer Lap Chi Chu and the projection designers at 59 Productions have pared everything to a few basic elements: arches, screens, snow, branches, shadows and “Seventh Seal” silhouettes.From left, Danny Wolohan, Anthony Michael Lopez, Soo and Fergie Philippe. The costumes, by Jennifer Moeller, are just as stunning as ever.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith so little furniture onstage, Sher, incapable of not making pretty pictures, keeps everyone moving busily; if the story refuses to make a triangle, he’ll compensate with dozens in his blocking. However fascinating that is to watch, the result feels abstract and analytical, of a piece with Byron Easley’s dainty choreography and, not to harp on them, Lerner’s lyrics. For “My Fair Lady” Lerner was able to find words that expressed character and period; in “Camelot” (with no underlying Shaw play to assist) he finds words that mostly express himself, on the bubble of the 1960s, sophisticated and dry.That is not, however, what you hear coming from the pit, where, under Kimberly Grigsby’s baton, 30 musicians play the original orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett and Philip J. Lang. Their superb characterization of the story in pure sound makes you feel what the show onstage doesn’t.It may also make you feel a bit sad. What’s to be done with such beautiful work, wedded to such intractable problems? How many more Golden Age musicals can Sher and Lincoln Center Theater lavish their love on before the project turns into Encores! with elephantiasis? Is Kelli O’Hara in “Flahooley” next?Well, to be honest, I’d be there for that. But “Camelot” is a show promoted above its station because of its music and Kennedy-era associations. Neither, it seems, is sufficient today. When Arthur reports, in “How to Handle a Woman,” that the answer is simply to “love her, love her, love her,” you can’t help thinking Lerner is not in his wheelhouse. (He married eight times.) Love, with both people and musicals, isn’t enough when the differences are irreconcilable.CamelotAt the Vivian Beaumont Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. More

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      Review: How to Shoot Your Parents, in ‘Pictures From Home’

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      In a stage adaptation of Larry Sultan’s photo memoir, Nathan Lane stars as the father everyone’s aiming at.Several weekends a month, from 1982 to 1992, the photographer Larry Sultan visited his parents in Southern California in search of a story. Was it a mark of his failure or his overachievement that, instead of one, he found many?In any case, in “Pictures From Home,” the 1992 photo memoir that resulted, Sultan created a classic of visual polyphony. Whatever he believed the work to be — a family portrait, a marital inquest, a takedown of Reagan-era masculinity — it was so much more by being all of them at once.But a book of staged photographs, home movie stills and discrepant first-person narratives was also, by the nature of the medium, flat: the better to ponder its mille-feuille of contradictions. The camera, after all, stops time.That would seem to make Sultan’s “Pictures From Home,” however brilliant, an unlikely source for stage adaptation, the stage being where time can never stand still. And indeed, the play by Sharr White that opened on Thursday at Studio 54, in a production directed by Bartlett Sher, has not made it all the way from two dimensions to three. Though honorable, thoughtful and wonderful to look at, with crafty performances by Danny Burstein, Zoë Wanamaker and especially Nathan Lane, it caulks so many of the book’s expressive cracks that the best thing about it — its mystery — is sealed out.Part of that is inevitable insofar as actors must have something concrete to act. To provide it, White has developed scenes from tiny cues in Sultan’s text, turning the subterranean Oedipal conflict between father and son, and to a lesser extent the conjugal one between husband and wife, into obvious rhubarbs, skits and lectures.For actors like these, such carvings are raw meat, no matter that the carcass gets stripped. Burstein has a field day with Larry, who begins the play by announcing to the audience that “this project will become one of my hallmark achievements.” As his chest puffs out, Burstein puffs it back in: “I know that’s not a modest thing to say.”It’s a peculiar choice to write Larry as a nervous pedant, proud yet endlessly defensive. But what he’s defending himself against immediately becomes clear upon Lane’s entrance as the father. “Are you still here?” is his first line.Burstein has a field day with Larry, our critic writes, and Lane’s peerless verbal and physical clarity make for an entertaining impression of Larry’s father, Irving.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the book, Irving Sultan is a glamorous remnant of the cocktails-at-lunch era of American business; at the peak of his career, he was a vice president at Schick. But having been put out to pasture some years before the photos were taken, his silver fox suaveness is mottled with flop sweat.As in his earlier plays — including “The Other Place” (a haunting Laurie Metcalf vehicle) and “The True” (catnip for Edie Falco) — White prioritizes playability over subtlety. Here he pulls at the threads of Irving’s vanity and petulance, unwinding them from his other qualities to provide the lurid outlines of a personality. That’s sufficient for Lane, of course, whose peerless verbal and physical clarity make for an entertaining if somewhat black-and-white impression. Each argumentative thrust and deflection is as sharp as an actor can render it, and anything faintly funny is primped into a generous laugh.That’s good news for the audience but less so for the real Irving, who was already skeptical about how his son would portray him, without having imagined how a playwright and Nathan Lane would. (Irving died in 2009 — as did Larry.) That the book’s tough bird winds up onstage a lovable bellyacher is one of the mysteries to be filed under “lost in translation.”Translation is even unkinder to Larry’s mother, Jean Sultan, whom Wanamaker plays with pinpoint sociological precision. (The costumes by Jennifer Moeller and the wigs by Tommy Kurzman help immensely.) What Wanamaker cannot do, because the script does not permit it, is restore dignity to a woman who deserves it. After raising Larry and his two brothers, then watching her husband short-circuit his career, she took up her own because somebody had to; in her first year as an independent real estate agent, she sold $18 million in property.Some of the book’s most trenchant photographs trace that transformation. (Projected at huge scale by 59 Productions against the back wall of Michael Yeargan’s slope-roofed, garishly green trompe l’oeil set, they look fantastic.) In them we see Jean, in late middle age, emerging from her housewifey past to become a serious breadwinner, with all the attendant anxieties. How this threatens Irving’s sense of privilege and primacy is clear enough on paper.The triple portrait of the Sultans in the play deviates from what is presented in the memoir, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet in the play Jean is reduced to third banana and comic relief. She floats in and out of the men’s arguments and dithers in search of lost To Do lists. In one particularly unfortunate bit, elaborated from an innocuous sentence in the book, she is made to perform schtick like a bawdy 1960s comedienne about the size of the zucchini Irving grows in a garden. “He’s so proud of how huge it is,” she brays.For all I know, Jean, who died in 2004, really talked like that; White has said he had “many conversations” with Kelly Sultan — the artist’s widow — about her husband’s process and “the many complexities of Irv and Jean.” But even if accurate to life as lived, the triple portrait of the Sultans in the play feels inaccurate to life as recorded in the memoir. For one thing, Larry himself is made, if sympathetic, insufferable. As he gassed on fatuously about image and illusion, I too found myself impatiently asking, “Are you still here?”At just 1 hour and 45 minutes, with no intermission, a play should not feel padded, but it does. Still, it is hardly without its pleasures: It’s funnier than expected, and Sher’s poetic naturalism as he creates stage pictures is always moving to watch. Jennifer Tipton’s lighting reminds me of her superb work for dance.Nor does “Pictures From Home” lack for pathos — less so when it jerks the audience’s tears, at the end, than when it lets the questions of a son’s need for his parents, even well into their old age, sit patiently in frame. Stopping time with his camera, Larry tells us, was a way of not letting them die. How odd that a living thing like a play does the opposite.Pictures From HomeThrough April 30 at Studio 54, Manhattan; picturesfromhomebroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      On ‘Pictures From Home’ on Broadway, a Family Portrait Full of Secrets

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      The actor Nathan Lane had been planning to play the American anti-father Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” (1949) when that production fell apart. Restless during the pandemic and casting about for his next project, he read a draft of Sharr White’s “Pictures From Home,” which recalled “Salesman” to him: The two scripts share an almost incessantly angry, backward-looking gaze at the glory days of midcentury American masculinity, embodied by a discontented businessman. Now, as White’s play opens on Broadway this week, Lane, 67, will star as Irving Sultan, a former Schick razor executive who’s supported both emotionally and financially by his doting if frustrated wife, Jean Sultan (Zoë Wanamaker), while sparring with their childish 30-something son Larry Sultan (Danny Burstein, also doting, also frustrated), both of whom tend to Irv in their artichoke-colored Southern California ranch home even as he struggles to return their affection.The show, says Lane, is “about parents and mortality,” the latter of which has been on the actor’s mind since his 2020 cancer treatment. “They’re all fighting to tell their own story, and certainly Irv is fighting to protect this fantasy of his success.” Indeed, many arguments unfurl over 100 or so minutes, often in the form of direct audience address — it’s “part family dramedy, part documentary, part three-way TED Talk,” as Lane describes it — and the sorts of overlapping conversations native to people, like the Sultans, with Brooklyn roots and Palm Springs aspirations.Jennifer LivingstonWhat moves the play beyond that living room drama tradition is the source material: It’s based on Larry Sultan’s 1992 photo memoir of the same name, which the Bay Area-based artist published after dozens of visits to his parents’ San Fernando Valley home in the 1980s. Sultan then combined a decade’s worth of staged photographs and recorded interviews of his mother and father, both of whom died soon after the book’s release, with stills from home movies taken during his childhood to create a vulnerable family portrait that’s as much about aging as it is about accountability — and loyalty — to those we care about most. Photographers like Alec Soth and Stephen Shore still venerate the project, a longer version of which was republished in 2021; White discovered it in 2015, six years after the photographer’s death, as part of Sultan’s first career retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Afterward, the playwright contacted the artist’s widow, Kelly Sultan, and, over dinner, convinced her to let him option the book. She also agreed to open the archives so that White might achieve a new kind of bioplay, one that its director, Bartlett Sher, signed on to for its “multivariable potential,” he says, using found footage from the Sultans’ garage and photographic projections that, onstage, heighten the divide between truth and fiction.White, who also writes for television and has had two other plays on Broadway, both in different styles, says the half-decade he spent finishing this script was, from the start, an “investigation” into the Sultans’ power dynamics. In memoir and play alike, Jean and Irving are willing subjects … until they become skeptical co-conspirators, wondering why their son seems obsessed with chronicling them so harshly. “There’s lots of conflict, but it’s not the end,” adds White, 52, who had a strained upbringing with his own parents and is now raising two teenage sons in New York’s Hudson Valley with his wife, Evelyn Carr White, an artist and interior designer. “I was fascinated by this idea that you can say the worst thing, and ultimately nothing breaks.”And yet it’s Irv — depicted by Lane with jocular, egotistic bravado that barely masks his deep fear of irrelevance — who always seems to get the last word: “I’ll tell you about mess, Larry,” he says near the show’s conclusion. “You know what mess is? It’s intimacy. Intimacy is a big fat [expletive] mess. But I’ll tell you another thing. It’s love, too. OK? This thing you think you’re capturing. This evidence? This mess? It’s love.” More