Playwright: David Auburn. At: Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Tickets: 773-753-4472 or www.courtheatre.org; $45-$65. Runs through: April 14
It has taken a long time for David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Proof to finally "come home" as it were to the Court Theatre. After all, Auburn's 2000 play is set in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, and its main focus is the 25-year-old daughter of a University of Chicago mathematics professor.
The delay probably has to do with the fact that Proof was one of the few hit non-musical Broadway dramas that actually toured in the past decade, playing its Chicago debut at the Shubert Theatre in 2002. Then in terms of Proof's first professional regional production, the Goodman Theatre had dibs on that with an African-American cast directed by Charles Smith in 2004.
And Proof's true University of Chicago homecoming was last year in a student production that helped open the new Logan Center for the Arts on campus. So Court Theatre's Proof might come off as a tad late to the party.
But leave it to artistic director Charles Newell to reconsider Auburn's drama in a rich staging that does away with a hyper-realistic setting and places more of an emphasis on the leading heroine's agitated and troubled state of mind amid Martin Andrew's stark modernistic set of stairs, platforms and a bench swing. Newell's take on Proof heightens Auburn's celebrated text, as memories, ghostly conversations and grief-filled confrontations all blend together into a seamless whole.
Proof is all about Catherine (Chaon Cross) who is mourning the recent death of her father, Robert (Kevin Gudahl), a brilliant mathematician who had struggled with madness. Catherine fears that she has inherited both her father's genius and mental issues, which come into focus when she reveals that she has figured out a complex and ground-breaking mathematical proof, much to the disbelief of her older sister, Claire (Megan Kohl), and her father's protege grad student, Hal (Erik Hellman).
Proof essentially falls or rises with its leading lady, and Cross expertly delivers a complex portrait of a young woman riddled with grief, fear and anger when her feelings and views are dismissed by those around her. The rest of the cast is also strong, especially Hellman as the self-aware geeky, yet still hip, mathematics student who also serves as a romantic interest to Catherine.
At Court Theatre, Proof gains a heightened resonance in part due to its production location (there's a mention of the street the theater is located on, plus a few jabs at Northwestern University that spurs big laughs). But Newell's clear and polished staging is also an amazing emotional asset, which shows why Proof has truly come home at Court Theatre.