Playwright: David Auburn
At: Goodman, 170 N. Dearborn
Phone: (312) 443-3800; $15-$35
Runs through: May 2
Proof has had the kind of success young playwrights can only dream of. Upon its opening in New York (with Mary Louise Parker in the lead role), it received rapturous reviews and was showered with important prizes, including the Tony, the Pulitzer, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Did it deserve all the hype and the awards?
Happily, the answer is yes. Proof is the kind of story that connects and engages us on many levels. It's a family drama; it's something of a mystery; it's a universal commentary on faith and trust in the people we love; it's a parable about human connection. And it's fiercely entertaining. Auburn's plot arc is fluid, his characters are real people and the words they speak are the poetry of everyday conversation. Auburn shows rather than tells this story of a Hyde Park family who has just experienced the death of its father (after a long illness that stole his health and his mind), a formerly brilliant mathematician who taught at the University of Chicago. He left behind two daughters, the younger Catherine, who has cared for her dying father at a huge cost: her own life and pursuing her own dreams. And there is Claire, off in New York and working in yuppie affluence as a currency analyst. Claire (played convincingly by Ora Jones) doesn't have the brilliance of her father and sister, and she is more conventional and more grounded in everyday reality, which often makes her all the more irritating. Catherine (in a bravura turn by Karen Aldridge, who is steadily building a diverse resume of amazing Chicago credits) inherited her father's penchant for mathematics (in its purest, most abstract sense, where it becomes more art than science) … and the fear is that she may have also inherited the mental instability that plagued his latter years. When a former student, Hal (Dwain Perry) discovers a notebook in the father's study that doesn't bear the gibberish stamp of his insanity, but in fact demonstrates a groundbreaking mathematical proof, a mystery is set in motion. Did Catherine really write this proof, as she claims, or did her father (Phillip Edward Vanlear), in a lucid period come up with it? The mystery is the crux of the play, and provokes much more thought about how we deal with our families and each other than it does about mathematics. Mathematics is only the structure around which the audience is drawn in to build more complex thoughts about how we relate to each other.
Chuck Smith does an admirable job of bringing Auburn's work home, as it were. I saw the play in its Broadway incantation and the Goodman version does an excellent job, but doesn't quite have the power of the New York version. The performances here are uniformly excellent, but after seeing Mary Louise Parker's incandescent interpretation of Catherine, Karen Aldridge simply can't compare (that's not to say her performance is in any way mediocre; it's inspired), which left me feeling just a little cold. If you haven't see Proof in its original form, prepare to be entertained, impressed, and touched. It has all the right stuff.
