Proof

by Toby Zinman

Another beautiful mind comes unhinged and the rarefied world of higher mathematics loses another genius. When Proof opens, Robert (Bev Appleton), a famous mathematics professor at the University of Chicago, has just died -- although he remains present to his daughter and thus to us -- after a fallow decade that ended with his descent into madness. His daughter, Catherine (Alexandra Geis), herself a mathematical wizard, has sacrificed four years of her life as well as her college education caring for him, while her sister, Claire (Christie Parker), who is merely "quick with numbers" as a currency analyst, has had a full life in New York, footing the financial bills but none of the emotional ones.

Hal (Geoff Sobelle), one of Robert’s former graduate students, is now a mathematics professor himself. While helping sort through his idolized professor’s gibberish-filled notebooks, he and the tense and troubled Catherine begin a romance. When Catherine gives him a notebook with an extraordinary breakthrough proof in it, the second act turns on proof of the proof’s authenticity. While the play seems to say that what is really required is trust -- proof, after all, makes belief easy -- it nevertheless provides proof for its audience, not trusting us with the more difficult and interesting task.

Even more disappointing is that David Auburn’s engrossing play (which won both the Tony and Pulitzer) is merely another family drama, parents and their adult children doing the generational love-and-guilt thing patented by American playwrights from O’Neill to Miller to Williams. And Proof’s family members could just as easily be plumbers or lawyers as mathematicians. Unlike some of the dazzling contemporary plays about mathematics and science (Stoppard’s Arcadia and Frayn’s Copenhagen are fine examples), the play itself doesn’t make use of its subject -- there is nothing mathematical in its structure or in its staging.

There are, too, inelegant flaws. For instance, it puzzled me that the prime example of Robert’s craziness is his belief that aliens were sending him coded messages via the Dewey decimal system on library books, since most major university libraries -- including University of Chicago -- use the Library of Congress system of classification. And why would math people who have spent their lives in one of the most powerful math departments in the country think all mathematicians are nerds/dweebs/geeks?

Three of the four actors -- Sobelle being the splendid exception -- give superficial readings of their characters, never creating personalities beyond easy type. Director James Christy finds the right gentle pacing for the many scenes, and the lighting (Jerold R. Forsyth) creates a lovely backyard.

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