Actor Danny Burstein dishes on his latest Jewish role on Broadway

(New York Jewish Week) – In ‘Pictures from Home,’ a new Broadway play, a photographer takes on a nearly 10-year project to chronicle the lives of his aging parents. As the son snaps photos and interrogates his parents at their Southern California home, the three offer very different versions of their past together and argue about the meaning of “truth.”

“There was a lot of emotion during the show,” said Broadway veteran Danny Burstein, who plays son Larry. “Larry’s desire and passion to know more and to look critically not only at others but at himself inspires me. It’s a beautiful story.”

Written by Sharr White and directed by Bartlett Sherr, the play is based on the 1992 photo memoir of Larry Sultan, a celebrated photographer who died in 2009. Nathan Lane plays Father Irving, a Brooklyn-born Jew who struggled as a salesman but eventually became vice president at Schick, the razor company. Acclaimed British actress Zoë Wanamaker plays the mother, a real estate agent who sometimes feels underappreciated as a breadwinner following Irving’s early (or forced?) retirement. Irving, who grew up partly in a Jewish orphanage, bitterly recalls the anti-Semitism he faced—and swallowed—as he climbed the shaky ladder of success.

And father and son are not only at odds over the project, but also over Larry’s career. Irv cannot quite understand how his son actually makes a living as a photographer and asks: “Where is the strictness?”

Throughout the play, live footage, home videos and the enlarged photos of his parents that appeared in Sultan’s photo memoir are projected onto the set behind the actors.

lady, 58, was nominated for a Tony Award for his portrayal of Tevye in the recent Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof. A week after Pictures opened, he spoke to New York Jewish Week about the show’s Jewishness and how it has influenced him so far.

This interview has been edited slightly for length and clarity.

New York Jewish Week: The concept of the show is a bit difficult to describe – it is a play based on a series of photographs. How would you describe what the play is about?

Danny Burstein: It’s based on the beautiful book of the same title, which has incredible pictures but also contains the memories of his time with his parents. It’s all a bit muddled, but it comes together nicely. A play has never been told like this and it’s quite unique. So it’s different, and you need to let people know that it’s different than anything they’ve seen before in terms of storytelling. It’s a family story and it’s also the story of the making of art – sometimes quiet, sometimes passionate and fleeting. Sometimes it’s very funny. It’s all those things when you make a work of art.

In other words, you “feel all feelings.” That’s the beauty of the piece. In the end, Larry discovers things about himself, his history, and his parents.

Were you familiar with Larry’s work prior to the show, or did playing with him bring you closer to him?

I wasn’t at all familiar with his work before the play, but at the same time I feel very, very connected to the work now and to who he was. One of the things I’m very thankful for is Larry’s [widow], Kelly, provided us with some of the actual tapes and recordings of conversations with his parents so I could actually hear them speak. It was suddenly a very different kind of animal.

It was dramatized for our show and there was inconsistency at times, but mostly the two just sat together and made love and talked and remembered and heard their origin stories like how the family got from Brooklyn to California. It really is a beautiful story and there is a lot of love in the family. I also love Larry’s artistic quest and sensibility to find multiple different meanings in one image, maybe hundreds of meanings. He believed that each person subjectively finds their own meaning in a work of art and I love that about him.

How do you think the family’s Judaism affected the way they interacted with the world and with each other?

It [their Jewishness] absolutely affects the way they exist in the world. I always think of [Larry’s] artistic journey as very Talmudic – it seems to me that he is constantly asking questions and trying to get to the bottom of things. It’s basically Jewish. This practice of always questioning and bringing these questions not only into religion but also into everyday life and into art is also fundamentally Jewish. I don’t want to suggest that only Jews are intellectually exceptional, but that this level of intellectual aspiration is part of Jewish culture.

Larry’s Jewishness, then, certainly influenced his intellectual and artistic aspirations. How do you think your Jewish background influenced your approach to this character and the characters you’ve played in the past?

I was raised a certain way: to question things. I can see a lot of my own relationship with my own father in Larry and Irv’s relationship. I’m sure I drove my father crazy. When I told my parents I wanted to be an actor, they weren’t dismissive. They didn’t say, “You’re wasting your life,” but they weren’t exactly supportive either. They stayed very neutral and said, “If you’re going to do this, you’re going to have to work your ass off to make your dream come true.” So it wasn’t so much about the pursuit of financial success, as Irv says, but about that they worried if I could make a living and survive on it.

I think it’s the same kind of fear any parent would have. My younger son is a musician and my older son is a premiere [assistant director] on movies. Those aren’t exactly the things you’d get into to make a lot of money. They are pursuits of passion. I think I felt the same way, worried about her. But I knew my own journey and the journey of my father, who wanted to be a writer – he studied with Philip Roth at the University of Iowa – and then decided to leave all of that to pursue a career in ancient Greek philosophy. So I guess he got it the way I did too. I think it all closes. So I didn’t hit the kind of wall that Larry did, where Irv would basically call him a loser like he does on the show because he wasn’t a financial success anymore.

Pictures from Home is currently running through April 30, 2023 at Studio 54 (254 W. 54th St.). Tickets and information here.