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Proof stands up in Gloucester
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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Proof
By David Auburn. Directed by Jason Southerland. Set by Zeynep Bakkal. Lighting by Russell Swift. Costumes by Adriana Tulian. With Jennifer Malloy, Adam Paltrowitz, Richard Mawe, and Lily Rabe. At Gloucester Stage Company through August 3.
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The burden of Proof lies with the actor playing troubled college-dropout math whiz Catherine. The role was essayed, in the original Broadway staging of David Auburn’s Pulitzer-winning 2000 play, by Mary-Louise Parker, who made of Catherine an idiosyncratic, speech-slurring depressive savant; the interpretation may have surprised Auburn but was brilliant nonetheless. (Parker was replaced by queen of quirk Jennifer Jason Leigh and then by Anne Heche.) When the national-touring production passed through Boston in early 2002, an unknown named Chelsea Altman rendered a Catherine more scathing and less wounded than Parker’s; hers too was a crackling performance. Now, at Gloucester Stage Company, Lily Rabe takes over, delivering an intense, loving Catherine, prickly with incredulity in the manner of a college student but, despite the Garment District wardrobe, sadly wise beyond her years. And not just in matters of math, with which Proof ostensibly deals, though none is actually done. Rabe, still a theater student at Northwestern and the daughter of playwright David Rabe and film star Jill Clayburgh, will not lack connections. Fortunately, the actress, who is making her second appearance in Gloucester, does not lack talent, either. Proof is an interesting play to see multiple times. Much lauded and awarded a Tony to go with that Pulitzer, it has nonetheless been unfavorably compared with the headier twosome of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. Repeated viewings enable one to see both the craft and the facility of the work, which amounts to a mathematical whodunit and a tale of the hope and the dread that come with genes. Unlike the more substantive works of Frayn and Stoppard, Proof does not attempt to create parallels between the math or science perpetrated by the characters (in Copenhagen the Nobel-winning physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg) and its own ethical concerns or trajectory. Auburn admits he knows no more about higher mathematics than is in this piece, where the lights fade, as if on a 1950s sex scene, whenever serious number theory comes into play. He does employ a double-edged title, "proof" standing for both the complex demonstration of a mathematical theorem and for what is demanded, to her emotional damage, of the heroine when she finally unveils the genius that dogs her, since in her family it comes attached to early burnout and madness. Catherine is the 25-year-old daughter of recently deceased University of Chicago professor Robert, who made major contributions to algebraic geometry and "nonlinear operator theory" almost before his acne cleared up. But in the "young man’s game" of higher math, he went from shooting comet to the safe, dull orbit of academe and from there to slovenly insanity. Having devoted what would have been her college and post-grad years to taking care of him, the formally uneducated Catherine wonders what she’s inherited, both in aptitude and in mental instability. Robert’s death brings onto the scene — the ramshackle porch of an old house near the university — both Catherine’s sister Claire, a New York currency analyst (only a fraction of the egghead talent but big bucks), and Hal Dobbs, formerly Robert’s student, now UC junior faculty, who is going through "graphomaniac" dad’s notebooks in search of post-breakdown flecks of lucidity. When the initially hostile Catherine gives him the key to her heart — actually to the drawer where a complex proof is stored — doubts as to its authorship ensue. At Gloucester Stage, Zeynep Bakkal has designed an effective set — more abstract than the original — in which the porch is both supported and weighed down by books. (During the crazy years, Robert swam in tomes from the library, apparently because he thought aliens were sending mathematical messages through the Dewey decimal system.) But Jason Southerland’s naturalistic production, like Daniel Sullivan’s original, does nothing to distinguish between when Catherine is talking to the living and when she’s talking to the dead in this ramshackle comfort zone where, at GSC, stagehands are continually covering and uncovering the cast-off furniture. The quartet of actors is assured. Jennifer Malloy as Claire is insufferably condescending though chic and believably concerned about her rumpled sister (whom she treats like a bomb that may explode). Adam Paltrowitz is credible as skinny, passionate math geek Hal. Richard Mawe captures the intellectual energy but also the dictatorial side of the mad dad who in his decline scribbles proofs about the weather. As for the attractive, aggressive Rabe, who so touchingly hits on Catherine’s adoration of her father, well, she’s on her way.
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