David Auburn’s 2001 Pulitzer and Tony winner Proof, popularized by the 2005 film, must be something of a pet project for director Chris Anton, a math editor at Pearson Education. But, even though a guy in front of me showed up to the Independent Drama Society‘s current production at the Factory Theatre in a Swarthmore Spheromak Experiment t-shirt (you don’t get that at the Huntington), Proof isn’t really all that concerned with math. At least, not like Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (to which Proof is often compared) is concerned with its science. Auburn enjoys inserting strains of logical and deductive argument into the dialogue, where characters (all of whom must’ve done pretty damn well on the math section of the SAT) call each other out over the logical fallacies of their arguments and conversation–trying to prove each other wrong by identifying contradictions in the other’s statements. Even in their most heightened emotional states, there are a lot of “but if you A, then why do you care about X.” Even then, the math of Proof is a maguffin for a much more human story of love and trust and mental illness, not the surreal quantum-mechanics-informed reality of Copenhagen.
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