Proof: A Play

This is a reread for me as I'm teaching the play next week. It's a short, stunning play (it won a Pulitzer) about math, madness, and family dynamics. Catherine, a brilliant mathmetician, gave up her hopes of a college education and a career to care for her mathmetician father, who had "gone bonkers." Now she wonders if she is going down the same path, and her sister Claire's oversolicitousness isn't helping. After her father's funeral, his former student finds an impossibly brilliant mathmatical proof in the professor's notebooks. The question is: who wrote it? The play is sad, witty, and, yes, hopeful, all in one.

A fascinating, layered look into the lives of a brilliant mathematician and his mathematically gifted daughter. Despite the heavy role math plays in the story, there is very little actual mathematics involved in this play. Instead, Auburn addresses larger concerns that could refer to any subject matter: lost potential and the question of when it becomes too late to make certain choices in one's life; family and the cost of caring for loved ones to the detriment of one's own interests and progress; the fine line between grief and madness; aging and all of its potential for destroying a person long for they die. A poignant, involving play where the characters are always intriguing and real, even when they are not particularly lovable.

This has been one of my all-time favorite plays for a very long time. It may be because of the subject matter: mathematics and psychology. This is the story of a 25-year-old woman who is the daughter of a famous mathematician who went insane. She grapples with the question of her own sanity, her future, a new man in her life, and her prudent sister after her father's death. It brings up so many questions I've had for myself that it has always been easy for me to identify with it.

I saw this play produced very well and the movie, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, and Jake Gyllenhaal, is also done particularly well (with a script written by the play's author and following the play closely with some very interesting changes due to show more the added flexibility of a film rather than a play). Auburn's poetic writing from the point-of-view of an insane genius is moving and magnificent. Catherine's character is wholly developed and realistic, being someone I could see being friends with.

If there is a production of this in your area, I encourage you to go! As a fine substitute, rent the movie. And above all, read Auburn's beautiful play! show less

Proof, by David Auburn, is a compelling and tautly beautiful play, ringing with a quiet elegance. Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play, I was introduced to it through the 2005 movie, which now having read the play I realize was an extremely good adaptation, as well as a very good film in its own right. It's the story of Catherine, a brilliant but somewhat neurotic mathematics student who has lived all her life in the shadow of her famous father, a groundbreaking mathematician revered the world over. The play begins with a dialogue between Catherine and her father, in which he berates her for wasting her potential, while gradually, during the course of it, we discover that her father is show more insane, and has been for quite some time. He is living in semi-seclusion while Catherine looks after him. Then, as the conversation goes on, we - and Catherine - realize that her father is dead; as he calmly informs her "Heart failure. Quick. The funeral's tomorrow." From there, we are slowly sucked into a drama of at once deep intensity and lyrical lightness. Abruptly deprived of the man who, for better or worse, was the center of her existence for all her life, Catherine finds herself having to cope with life and relationships beyond her father, as Harold, a graduate student of her father's, begins going through all her father's journals to see if by some chance he wrote anything significant during his recent years of insanity. Catherine, immediately defensive and certain that her father wrote nothing but graphomaniac scribbles during the last few years, throws him out of the house. Claire is the fourth person in this coterie, Catherine's domineering, overly-careful sister, who ran out on both her father and Catherine years ago(although supporting them financially) and is now determined to drag her "troubled" little sister back with her to New York and fix her up. As half the story is told in flashbacks to scenes betweens Catherine and her father when he was still alive, these make up the four main characters.

Three of the four main characters are mathematicians, and while there is little or no actual math in the play it is still a mathematicians dream(in much the same way Possession is a poet's/writer's dream). One of the many funny moments of the play consists of Hal's band playing a song composed entirely of silence, based on the imaginary number "I", a mathematician's joke.

Proof is a tale of many things; isolation, loneliness, love, hate, the clashing of wildly different characters from different worlds(Harold, more often called Hal, belongs to a band, and Catherin's sister doesn't understand math), and the love-hate relationships engendered within families. But mostly, it is about the quest for genius to find security and definition in a world untailored for fragile people, and to set free the impulse that drives that genius. Proof has an oddly breathless feel at times; as if both Catherine and her burgeoning talent hang in the balance between existence and destruction. In an blending of poetry, prose, and math, we discover her fate, of which the following passage(one of several turning points in the play) is a perfect example -
"Let X equal the cold. It is cold in December. The months of cold equal November through February. There are four months of cold and four of heat, leaving four months of indeterminate temperature. ...Let X equal the month of full bookstores. The number of books approaches infinity as the number of months of cold approaches four. I will be as cold now as I will in the future. The future of cold is infinite. The future of cold is the future of heat..."

Still, while Proof is a remarkable and luminous work, somehow it lacks something - the immensity of vision that I would expect from a Pulitzer-Prize-winning play. It is essentially about individuals, not ideas, and while to some extent this is true of all great literature, still Proof feels small, constrained within its own eclectic world. And there is no great tragedy, love story, or revelation about human nature to make up for this, to dominate it and lift it into a book that says something, a book that will join the pantheon of great literature. It has depth but not width. It's graceful and beautiful, clever and often funny - certainly memorable - but it is not an important work.

http://amberletterstotheworld.blogspot.com/2007/08/proof.html show less

A truly brilliant look at how genius and mental instability fall hand in hand. The play brings up the distress of creation and anxiety of work that is passionate yet not understood by the masses.

A play dealing with mental illness and mathematics. The very idea sounds unworkable but it isn't. The mathematics are not explicated in great detail, and form sort of a silent extra character. The mental illness is more the subject of the play, and the idea of hereditary schizophrenia is touched on here, without any great depth or resolution. The final take home message almost seems to echo that of A Brilliant Mind, as though the writer's of the world were pointing an accusing finger at mathematicians and saying "Crazy!". So, should we ask ourselves, does math make people crazy? Or maybe the question is, do only crazy people love math? Or maybe there's something else altogether that has brought together this convergence of math and show more mental illness. An interesting play, and one that is worth the time to read. show less

Did not know I had gotten a play about math when I started. But it's also about learned helplessness and how exhausting it is to not be understood. Enjoyed it even though I have no idea what the math conversations are about.