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Prime time
The Pulitzer-winning Proof proves itself
BY CAROLYN CLAY

Proof
By David Auburn. Directed by Daniel Sullivan. Set by John Lee Beatty. Costumes by Jess Goldstein. Lighting by Pat Collins. Original music and sound by John Gromada. With Chelsea Altman, Robert Foxworth, Stephen Kunken, and Tasha Lawrence. At the Wilbur Theatre through February 17.


Mathematicians may not be such exotic folk as the current box-office favorites, hobbits and wizards. No matter, they’re weird enough for those of us daunted by Form 1040 and the checkbook. Yet in David Auburn’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning Proof, the national-touring version of which is at the Wilbur, the world of the numerically endowed seems at once homy, peopled by rumpled, beer-drinking types who happen to rattle off incomprehensible things about prime numbers, and heady in the Fitzgeraldian sense, its denizens possessed by the notion of burning out bright but early.

The play’s central character, Catherine, is an emotionally fragile 25-year-old who has devoted the past several years to the care of her mathematician father, a once-brilliant University of Chicago professor whose early work in algebraic geometry and nonlinear operator theory both astonished the world and fried his mental " machinery. " Manic, scattered, and smelly, he has spent most of his recent career (despite a brief remission) shambling through bookstores and trying to decode messages sent by aliens using the Dewey decimal system. Catherine, herself a math prodigy, albeit largely uneducated, broods on how much of her father’s gift, and how much of his instability, she harbors.

Unlike Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia or Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, Proof does not set up intricate parallels between its characters’ mathematical or scientific pursuits and its own ethical and emotional concerns. It does, however, employ a double-edged title. " Proof " refers both to the term for a mathematical demonstration of a theorem and to what Catherine is asked to cough up on a more personal level. In this regard she is doubted both by a domineering older sister and by an ambitious young mathematician, a former student of her father’s, who isn’t sure whether he wants to stake claim to her brain or her boudoir (or both). And if the much-lauded Proof isn’t quite what it’s been cracked up to be, Auburn’s family drama swathed in a whodunit (which drifts between present and past) is artfully constructed and, like many a math test, keeps you guessing.

Proof opened in 2000 at the Manhattan Theatre Club and quickly moved to Broadway; accolades were pretty equally divided between the play itself and its extraordinary star, Mary-Louise Parker, who created an idiosyncratic, speech-slurring Catherine who, though sullenly hip and hyper-aware, seemed almost a depressive savant. (She was replaced on Broadway by Jennifer Jason Leigh.) Chelsea Altman, who plays Catherine on the tour, is a different being altogether, sexier, more scathing, and less wounded. But she gives a terrific performance, one in which the instability that haunts Catherine takes the forms of sadness, sarcasm, and anger — some of it launched into deadpan putdowns and sizzling tirades that can be hilarious. Altman also conveys her character’s ease with, and adoration of, her cracked dad. In the person of Falcon Crest star Robert Foxworth, father Robert is folksy, disheveled, and bullying, with edges of both the manic and the messianic (and a crusader’s zeal against pasta, " a euphemism people invented when they got sick of eating spaghetti " ).

Claire is the older sister, a New York City currency analyst who has paid the bills while Catherine took care of dad. In the wake of his death, Claire wants to spirit Catherine off to the Big Apple, where she’ll be easier to manage. Tasha Lawrence, rubbing her knees and tapping her fingers, makes the character both loathsome and logical. It is to her credit (and Auburn’s) that even the least sympathetic character in Proof does not lack complexity. The familial outsider is Hal, a possibly opportunistic mathematician who plays in a rock band whose signature tune is a silent homage to imaginary numbers. He has been crawling through " graphomaniac " Robert’s piles of notebooks in search of something brilliant. When he finds it, the question is: who wrote it? Stephen Kunken’s Hal is credibly retro-nerdy (especially the shirts) but not without masculine force.

Directed here, as it was on Broadway, by Daniel Sullivan, Proof is low on atmospherics. In contrast to the brilliant Robert Falls revival of Death of a Salesman, there is little to distinguish fantasy from reality, when Catherine is talking to people who are there from when she is talking to those who are not. Instead, the directorial artistry goes into the business of creating a comfort zone in which there is little comfort. When home, its broad, ramshackle porch a clutter of dead leaves, rusted furniture, and dappled light, carries the likelihood of genius and madness, how comfortable is that? Its mathematics may be facile, but emotionally, Proof adds up.

 

Issue Date: January 31-February 7, 2002
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