As virtually everyone who has ever produced the play has taken pains to point out, David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize winner Proof is about mathematics, but it takes no particular understanding of that subject to enjoy this family drama.
It does help if you appreciate good writing and performances, which the Palm Beach Dramaworks production has in abundance.
Like Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, which began the season for this West Palm Beach company, the world of Proof unfolds entirely on a back porch. There, 25-year-old Catherine, the daughter of a renowned University of Chicago math professor, tries to figure out her life.
She had put her own promising math career on hold to be her mentally unstable father Robert’s caregiver. But now that she has reached the age that he began losing his grip on reality, Catherine has to wonder whether she has inherited more than a heady facility for numbers from him.
Robert’s death triggers an academic scavenger hunt, with Hal, an ambitious grad student, combing through the professor’s scribbled notebooks for any work of worth. Catherine eventually leads him to a breakthrough math proof, but its authorship presents a mystery that becomes the play’s engine.
At its core, however, Proof is a play about family dynamics, between Robert and Catherine, as well as between Catherine and her older sister Claire, a take-charge New York currency analyst who has been financially supporting her father and sister from a distance.
We see conversations between Robert and Catherine both while he was alive and after his death. The latter, of course, may represent his continuing importance in her life or a sign of her progressing mental illness. Either way, there is a palpable bond between the often sullen young woman and the charismatic older man, seen in moments of sanity and of madness.
The antagonism between the two sisters is more down-to-earth. Claire is used to imposing her attitudes on others, right down to the way they should take their coffee, and she quickly becomes overbearing as she takes charge of Catherine’s future. Then there is math geek Hal, a socially awkward guy with romantic designs on Catherine, which may be motivated by his interest in taking credit for bringing the previously unknown proof to the attention of the math world.
Auburn juggles these various threads with agility and considerable humor. Director William Hayes delivers it with simplicity and clarity, drawing first-rate work from his four cast members.
Katherine Michelle Tanner (Catherine) anchors the production as the moody, possible math genius, as tentative as stylish Sarah Grace Wilson (Claire) is assured. Kenneth Kay impresses as Robert, particularly in a flashback where his mind has gone unhinged, and Cliff Burgess earns prominence for outsider Hal, with both the character’s numerous comic lines and his unexpected tender side.
Auburn, currently represented on Broadway by The Columnist, has not made much theatrical impact since Proof arrived on the scene in 2000. But if you doubted his ability to write a solid, engaging, accessible drama, Palm Beach Dramaworks provides the proof.
PROOF, Palm Beach Dramaworks, 201 Clematis St., West Palm Beach. Through Sunday, June 17. Tickets: $55. Call: (561) 514-4042.