The publicity for Picture Imperfect leads us to expect another jeremiad involving first-world families fretting over less-than-perfect offspring, but while its personnel includes a little boy afflicted with autism, the play is not about him. It's about his two patently unfit parents, abusive daddy George and enabling mommy Mary.
George spends his days at the casino, carries a gun in anticipation of encounters with debt collectors, and lives with his bimbo-waitress girlfriend Pam. Mary collects public aid, home-schools young Cole, and shoplifts art supplies for the latter's surprisingly adroit paintings. (Elder son Eric mostly sleeps, when not quarreling with his Mum.)
Mary, we learn, married George after becoming pregnant at 17. Eric showed promise as a baseball player before George's bullying drove him to drugs. With the birth of their second son, George abandoned them but now sees big money to be made from his estranged son's talents. Since Mary has been advised by a social worker to seek child support, she welcomes her former husband's dubious overtures.
The problem with Richard J. Zieman and Joel Z. Cornfield's play is not its ambivalence regarding the holiness of filial piety when coupled with appalling judgment, but that its literary gestation appears to be stalled in the storyboarding stages—a technique originating in the motion picture business—making for a narrative structured as a gallery of disparate scenes, rather than exhibiting a clearly defined objective. Further development could resolve some of the ambiguities manifested in its current production: fleshing out personalities to render Mary as sympathetic and George as charming as the plot demands. (Alyssa Thordarson's Pam comes off so savvy that we wonder what she can possibly find attractive about a man who still calls women, "Baby.") Authors Zieman and Cornfield might also remind us that Cole is not just a McGuffin propelling custodial conflict, but the only character with the potential for a future. Clues as to Eric's dramatic purpose could be inserted more judiciously, and the necessity of a firearm-waving confrontation reconsidered altogether.
It's not uncommon for collaborative efforts to underestimate the negotiation process needed to arrive at accord on all fronts. Removing a dish from the oven before it's fully cooked is no crime, however, nor is it any disgrace for a text to undergo a few more rewrites to clear aside the accumulated clutter camouflaging the framework of the play that the authors envisioned.
