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.
In Proof, just to lay it out, Catherine (Kate Daly) is coping with the death of her mathematician don father Robert (Mark Borbeau) after caring for him and his atrophying mind. The entire play takes place on the back porch of a Professor’s Row house near the University of Chicago. Catherine strikes up a relationship with Hal (Chris Larson), math PhD student, admirer of her father, and persistent suitor. Her sister Claire (Kara Manson), a yuppie currency analyst, has flown in from New York to pick up the pieces of Catherine’s life, though she’s not so willing to be saved. An advanced and very publishable mathematical proof turns up in Robert’s desk, to which Catherine claims authorship, but that’s a tough sell for a girl who never got her bachelors and she doesn’t really sell it very hard. So doubt, coupled with a desire to ascribe the work to Robert, thereby allotting him a final stroke of genius, productivity, and just plain lucidity, surfaces, frustrating Catherine’s already frustrated life which just starts looking up at the end of the first act.
Kara Manson (as Claire) and Kate Daly (as Catherine) (Kimberly Smith)
Daly offers a convincing Catherine, not convincing us of some hidden hereditary genius, but rather a fragility and despondence thinly masked by bitchy defensive postures against those she deems as foes–almost anyone that talks to her. She’s sloppy, manic, dirty-mouthed, and sassy, but it all appears very much put on–as it should be. One doesn’t look at her and think “math genius,” but one shouldn’t. Her ability to do math is very much trumped by her humanity; her isolation, grief, frustration, and confusion. She’s pretty emo and Daly has a solid handle on projecting just enough victim and just enough bitch. She favored one corner of the back porch set to act wounded in, where she spent too much time looking away and pouting, in what became a stock reaction for lack of more complex blocking.
Where her performance most hurt was in scenes with Hal (Chris Larson, who also did a great job with the sound design, particularly some off-set party sound effects), Catherine’s gaunt recently despectacled math geek suitor. The play requires Catherine to emotionally move very quickly, from treating him with distrust, scorn, and borderline contempt (even though this may just be her way of liking boys), to head-over-heels intimacy, and back again, and then back once more. And the play doesn’t give them very much time to develop this relationship on stage. A few beers might help move things right into the bedroom for the characters, but it doesn’t help the actors or the audience. Larson had Hal down to every nervous back-of-the-neck-scratch, gangling pose, and the kind of confidence that only comes when you discover it late in life–as in after high school. The two couldn’t achieve the intimacy that’s crucial to the very pivotal scene when the proof turns up, the morning after Robert’s funeral party and Catherine and Hal’s first hook-up. In terms of mornings after, I think I felt more awkward than they did.
Mark Bourbeau as Robert (Kimberly Smith)
Although it’s a very different kind chemistry (more deeply seeded issues and incongruity than sparks, butterflies, and quarrels) Daly and Manson (as Claire, Catherine’s sister) are outstanding together. If Hal looks like he stepped off the train from Kendall, Katherine just came from State Street and probably took a cab. Smartly dressed by costume designer Lindsay Eagle, this prim and condescendingly sisterly analyst (she has the math too, just not as much) seeks to knock her sister out of her lethargic rut, playing mother when she needs to. After all, her life is in order, so why shouldn’t her sister’s be. In one memorably staged scene, she comes onto the porch with a breakfast tray, looking particularly bubbly for the hour (when you compare her to Catherine) to music that sounded like something off Mozart for Morning Coffee.
Mark Borbeau’s (Robert) performance wasn’t as defined as the others, likely because the play doesn’t tell us where he exists in it. We get him in pieces through flashbacks that may be straight up narrative flashbacks, or memories via Catherine. At times he seemed like a ghost, not of the genius he once was, but a projection of his daughter’s memories; faint and flat and distant. But, I suppose those same adjectives would come with his illness. Anton and his cast have done a superb job coaxing the humor of the play, with great wit and excellent timing–not forcing it and sacrificing the tragic content to over articulated humor. For a fringe production in a small space, Kirsten Opstad’s set, the costumes, and clever costume and hair changes, are all very well executed and I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with Glengarry Glen Ross in January.
Independent Drama Society presents “Proof” at the Factory Theatre (791 Tremont). Run continues on Thu 8/26 @ 7:00, Fri 8/27 @ 8:00, and Sat 8/28 @ 8:00. Tickets: $15 advance (browpapertickets.com), $17 at the door, $13 students/seniors.
