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Summarize this content to 100 wordsArtists are constantly sacrificing their families. And while it sucks to be related to someone, especially a child, who uses you in their work, or even if their work, the age-old media and the cultural establishment sniff and stand behind the truth of the precious artist.Parents? Unavoidable collateral damage. Just look at last year’s Tony Award-winning musical, “A Strange Loop.” And that’s just one example.But the nice thing about Sharr White’s intriguing and rather terrifying Broadway play “Pictures From Home,” starring Nathan Lane, Zoe Wanamaker and Danny Burstein, is that it differs from any other play or musical I’ve seen lately in that it actually gives the family enough ammunition to fight back.Danny Burstein (Larry Sultan), Zoë Wanamaker (Jean Sultan) and Nathan Lane (Irving Sultan) in ‘Pictures From Home’. The commercially produced black comedy, which premiered Thursday at Studio 54 under the direction of Bartlett Sher, is borrowed from the work of photographer Larry Sultan (Burstein), who embarked on a project in the 1980s to photograph his elderly parents and to interview as they walked around. their normal life.Sultan’s actual photos are a backdrop for the show. He had wanted to photograph his parents and write about them over time, including exploring his own developing relationship with them.Larry was already a respected artist. His father Irving was a razor blade salesman who avoided the fate of Willy Loman and went west to California, where he did quite well. His marriage to real estate agent Jean (Wanamaker) was a happy one, which isn’t to say their days were filled with bliss, of course.Presented here in an 1980s domestic environment cleverly designed by Michael Yeargen, the couple has a Reaganese quality about them. They love and tolerate their son’s project, but are annoyed by his obsession with photographing the melancholy in lives they have largely experienced as satisfying and happy.In their minds, he keeps making them look bad. And in fact he does. He wants to sell his work and knows very well that to do so requires a touch of 1980s American gothic.Nathan Lane (Irving Sultan) and Danny Burstein (Larry Sultan) in ‘Pictures From Home’. (Photo: Julia Cervantes)So there’s the core conflict: the unexamined life versus the examined life, the father who works for a living and the son who takes on speculative projects, the true believers in American exceptionalism and the artsy, cynical files which could only be so because his parents worked very hard to put bread on his table. It is a very timely and contradictory position on an important issue.Here’s an example of what I mean: Larry complains to his father that all his pictures, especially his wife’s, are posed in the way that nearly all domestic Kodachromes of the time were posed, designed to cover up any cracks, the subject , and make life look better than it was. Who wasn’t guilty of that in the 1980s, even if it now annoys the millennials who constantly want to take things apart?But Irving isn’t just complaining; he rightly points out that Larry’s award-winning photos are just as artificial, just as posed, pompous lighting and all, albeit with opposing goals.Who’s to say Irving’s snaps aren’t fairer? Who indeed, you think, as you sit and watch.Lane, who I have a hard time thinking is capable of playing at such an advanced age, can’t help but lean into the comedy given his preternatural ability to find the laugh in every sad or bitter line and though that spins the work in a way, that also has the happy result of enlivening and strengthening his character, and raising the stakes of the whole proceedings.Fabulous in a chronically underwritten role, Wanamaker plays the mediator between father and son, a role her Jean has always had to play, a product of her time. Bernstein is definitely emotionally involved here, but I found him too passive in places, too inclined to reach for the end of the play and let Lane wipe the floor with him at times. He needs to better defend the case of the young artist.But given how much our mythologies are based on our collective mortality, the young usually win, at least for a while. And while there’s a belated twist of fate, it looks like things won’t be any different here as Irving and Jean head off into the sunset in the Palm Desert.”Pictures From Homes” has its bumps and unusual choices and the shared narration is weird at times; it’s never quite clear why the audience is in the living room, if that’s where we are. Everything you need to look past.But White, Sher and this cast keep the focus on the right questions. While Broadway is obsessed with youth and rebellion, here’s a sweet and wise Broadway play about just wanting your mom and dad to carry on, wishing they could live forever, and realizing that any performer can complain and roar, but some wise ones choose in instead to make their loved ones immortal. And also the real stars of a Broadway show.A rare gift, to use wisely.