Proof

 

I read David Auburn's prize-winning play Proof last week because of its Broadway revival with Ayo Edebiri and Don Cheadle. I quite likely won't get to see this New York production, but I fully expect a local company -- Trustus, quite likely -- will mount one sooner rather than later. I think it would have broad appeal.

This spare but marvelous story is about a brilliant but mentally deteriorating University of Chicago mathematician named Robert and his 25-year-old daughter, Catherine, and her worries that, along with inheriting her father's facility with numbers, she might succumb to his mental illness. Is she one of the worried well?

Auburn sets the action on the back porch of Robert and Catherine's home. The story moves back and forth in time, a common device in modern drama that gets around the possible tedium of linear exposition, while unraveling the play's central puzzle.

The father/daughter relationship is the play's main concern, but it is given wonderful context by the two other characters, Claire, Robert's older daughter and Catherine's sister, and Robert's doctoral student/protege Hal, who all but lives in the professor's house as he explores his teacher's most recent recorded thoughts. Is there something groundbreaking there or just the ramblings of a withering mind?

As with many other classic and contemporary playwrights (O'Neill, Williams, Hellman, Miller, Albee, Jacobs-Jenkins) Auburn delves into tangled webs of family dynamics -- the celebrated and withholding father, the child who got out, the child who stayed, and the ward who might be trying to claim his own inheritance.

Auburn elegantly wrestles with love, anger, resentment, condescension, pain, forgiveness -- against a cold background, literally and figuratively, and reveals many relational truths.

A play with mathematics at its core would not ordinarily suggest warmth and humanity, but Auburn offers abundant "proof" that it is indeed possible.