This coming Friday marks the premiere of David Auburn’s 2000 play Proof at the Garfield Center for the Arts at the Prince Theatre.Directed by Mark Sullivan (of Short Attention Span Theatre fame), Proof is the full-length production debut for all four cast members.
When her brilliant and disturbed mathematician father Robert (played by Allen LaMontagne) dies of a sudden heart attack, Catherine (played by Anna Black) finds herself caught in a malaise. Having spent the last couple years of her life caring for her sick father, Catherine is startled to find Hal, one of her father’s former graduate students searching the dead man’s notebooks to see if his latter years produced anything coherent.
Played by Bennett Price, Hal is a loveably unassuming career math-nerd, serving as Robert’s protege at the University of Chicago. After Catherine decides to give him a special notebook to study, Hal must discern whether it is the work of his deceased mentor, or actually that of Catherine.
With a cleverly non-linear plot, Proof‘s storyline alternates between Catherine’s memories of her father’s highs and lows during his final years, to the present when her sister Claire (played by Abby Joiner Ritchie) arrives from New York for the funeral.
Not without a good bit of alt-rock nostalgia, director Mark Sullivan peppers the scene changes with healthy doses of R.E.M., Patti Smith, Weezer, The Velvet Underground and others– music he said was complimentary to Catherine’s personality. The aloof hipster-dork charm of Hal, and Claire’s yuppy giddiness at the mention of vegetarian chili also add a light bit of social commentary still relevant over 10 years after Proof won a Pulitzer, a Tony and several other prizes.
Ostensibly a play about the beauty of higher math, Proof’s punch lies not so much in its numerical rhapsodizing as the questions it asks about inheritability; both in terms of talent and the mental instability that often accompanies it.
“If I wanted to work a problem all day long, I did it,” says LaMontagne’s whimsical Robert to his daughter, talking about the surreal joys afforded by his mental landscape following the onset of his ‘sickness’.
“If I wanted to look for information–secrets, complex and tantalizing messages–I could find them all around me; in the air. In a pile of fallen leaves some neighbor raked together. In box scores in the paper, written in the steam coming off a cup of coffee. The whole world was talking to me.”
Proof also gently nudges at the stereotypes hemming in human creative potential, and determinism in general. Can a great work be achieved after one’s early twenties? And what if you are a woman in a male dominated field? What do prime numbers and creative geniuses have in common?
In short, there is a lot packed into this little play, and with that said, it will leave your own “machinery” (what Robert calls his brain) plenty to turn over both throughout the production and afterwards.
Proof performances will run from Friday to Sunday starting this weekend, March 16, and next weekend. Evening shows begin at 8pm, matinees at 3 pm.
Bennett Price says
Glad you enjoined it Simon. As always a pleasure to read your work.
Nancy Taylor Robson says
Saw the show last night and it was terrific.