By Samuel L. Leiter
The Broadway revival of David Auburn’s 1999 drama Proof at the Booth Theatre, directed by Thomas Kail (Hamilton), has various laudatory features, but it fails to prove that the play lives up to its stature as a winner of both the Pulitzer and Tony, among other honors. Originally produced at New Brunswick’s George Street Theatre before premiering Off Broadway in 2000 and then transferring to Broadway, it featured a four-member cast consisting of Mary-Louise Parker, Larry Bryggman, Johanna Day, and Ben Shenkman.
Its revival shifts the racial profiles of the characters but without distracting from its universal premises. In fact, it deepens interest by having a family of color be representative of issues more frequently consigned to whites. Proof, however, is not, without more its own issues of plausibility, many baked into the play itself.
At its heart, this is a domestic drama with a romantic complication built around problems of mental illness, family responsibility, and questions regarding the authorship of a potentially groundbreaking mathematical theorem. It’s set on and around the backyard porch of a modest, sometimes translucent South Chicago frame house (set by Teresa L. Williams; lights by Amanda Zieve)—much more modest than one might expect of its distinguished owner. That would be Robert (Academy Award winner Don Cheadle, Hotel Rwanda, in his Broadway debut), a world-renowned mathematics professor at the University of Chicago, whose mental breakdown necessitated his retirement.
His daughter is the emotionally confused, 25-year-old Catherine (Ayo Edebiri, “The Bear,” also making her Broadway debut), a math prodigy, who left university at Northwestern to care for him. When the play begins, Robert has recently died, but it takes us some time to realize this because Catherine sees and speaks to his ghost as if he were alive.
Soon we learn that Catherine fears she may have inherited not only Robert’s genius but his dementia. Since dramatic characters are often depicted by convention as talking to ghosts of the recently departed, it’s not clear if we’re to take this as a theatrical contrivance or a sign of psychological aberrance.
Catherine’s older sister, a currency analyst named Claire (Kara Young, two-time Tony winner, Purpose), arrives to settle the late professor’s affairs, wanting to sell the house and take Catherine back home with her. They argue about whether Robert was better off taken care of at home or whether an institution would have been better.
Meanwhile, 28-year-old PhD student of Robert’s, Hal (Jin Ha, Hamilton), has been closely perusing the latter’s numerous notebooks, looking for breakthroughs. When Catherine leads him to a particular one, its contents are so revolutionary that, even though he’s apparently been falling in love with her, he can’t believe her claim to have written it, insisting that the handwriting looks too much like Robert’s. This, naturally, leads to conflicts about trust, legacy, and the line between brilliance and insanity.
For all of Hal’s extraordinary excitement about the discovery, and the play’s insistence on an earthshaking importance that promises to alter the world of mathematics, its value in material terms never is clarified. This makes the casual attitude toward it of the hard-nosed Claire, who simply hands it off to Hal’s discretion, seem hard to swallow.
It’s also disturbing to see how much distress Hal’s doubt over the theorem’s provenance causes when the matter, it would seem, could be so easily dealt with by a few well-considered questions. Even the need to confront Catherine about the authorship could have been diplomatically managed, although it would have stopped the play dead in its tracks.
The proof is dealt with as a MacGuffin, not a real mathematical object. For the play to work, we must accept Auburn’s avoidance of real-life procedures as a necessary choice if we’re to confront the larger issues with which he’s contending, Ever since the fifth century BC folks have been asking why Oedipus ignored the oracle and married a woman old enough to be his mother. However, Auburn isn’t Sophocles.
And, for all the fuss over Catherine’s mental stability, what comes across in Edebiri’s performance is more emotional volatility and insecurity than anything so dire as to make Claire think she needs to be institutionalized. While it’s clear that Edebiri’s Catherine is a vulnerable soul, she lacks the charm necessary to win us over to her side.
Nor was I convinced by the long flashback scene in which Robert, sitting outside in his undershirt in what Catherine says is three degrees, writes in his notebook with ferocious ardor about being on the point of a major discovery. This is meant to make us believe we’re watching the controversial theorem be born. Despite Cheadle’s thoroughly convincing enthusiasm (it’s his highlight scene), however, it doesn’t take long to realize the scene is a red herring. And, given Catherine’s relatively flimsy winter wear (costumed by Dede Ayite), it takes a lot of effort to suspend one’s disbelief in just how cold she says it is.
The performances of Cheadle, Young, and Ha, fortunately, are consistently layered and believable, even when their material is not. The boyish Jin, the least professionally exposed cast member, brings a distinctly appealing sense of sincerity to Hal, making his struggle to resolve the dilemma of doubting the word of the girl he loves all the more pointed and poignant.
In sum, dramaturgic contrivance supersedes organic necessity; this is true of most plays, but here it just seems more obvious than I expected. Kail’s revival demonstrates both the durability and the limits of Auburn’s drama. The cast gives it more weight than the script sometimes deserves, and the emotional beats still land with a certain inevitability. But the play’s machinery shows through more clearly now, its contrivances harder to ignore, its mysteries less mysterious. What remains compelling are the actors and the atmosphere; what feels diminished is the play’s claim to greatness.
Photos by Matthew Murphy.
Headline photo: Ayo Edebiri in Proof.
