“Proof” Rings True, Just As Intended

If there is a mathematical proof sitting on a picnic table, and a young woman says she wrote it, and no one believes her because she is a young woman, and cannot possibly be as in control of her actions as she thinks she is … what is the probability of her statement actually being true?

At first glance, that’s the question characters spend the better part of Proof, the New Haven Theater Company’s fourth and final play of its 2015 – 16 season, trying to answer. The work runs weekends through May 14 at English Building Market on Chapel Street; ticket information here.

Set just blocks from the University of Chicago in a gentrifying Hyde Park, the 90-minute work follows Catherine (Megan Chenot) in the eight days after the death and funeral of her father Robert, a once-famous mathematician whose descent into hypergraphic lunacy at 25 put a premature end to his career. As Catherine prepares for his funeral — which falls around her 25th birthday — her older sister Claire (Deena Nicol-Blifford ) swoops into town with bagels, jojoba shampoo, and a big checkbook, declaring Catherine her newest project.

To the nudgy older sister, there’s also a doctoral-student-turned-love-interest named Hal (Christian Shaboo), who pores over Robert’s hundred-some notebooks, trying to find a moment of lucidity. He’s all but wooed Catherine when the play’s seeming conflict is revealed: Catherine announces that she has written a proof, inelegant but hers entirely, that has kept her level-headed during the final years of her father’s life. Hal and Claire don’t know whether to believe her, and she must prove that she is telling the truth — that her statement, like the proof itself, checks out. 

Mathy and meta, right? Wrong.

Proof is ultimately not a work about math, but a coming-of-age story with a little math and a lot of sentimentality. From the play’s outset to its end, Catherine is totally in control of her situation and her mind; it’s only the doubts of the ancillary characters, trying to find some error or blip in the problem set of her life, that threaten to undo her. Her mathematical proof is a MacGuffin, around which unfolds a much more interesting narrative about the limits of love, of trust, and of the human mind.

It’s not to say Proof is perfect. While peppered with delightfully feminist undertones, the script is, as Catherine describes her own mathematical work, ​“lumpy” and rushed. I recognize that I am totally in the minority here — attendees nationwide, writers, and the Pulitzer Prize committee have heralded the play as a work of genius, a sentiment with which I so would like to agree. But here’s what I got from listening: Playwright David Auburn fancies himself a young Tom Stoppard, but writes like a disgruntled ShondaLand employee who has seen back-to-back performances from General Hospital and Arcadia and published his 15-minute expository response to it. No spectral presence isn’t lifted from a better work, no dialogue left unhackneyed, no promising reference (and there are a few) not cut short. The work is smart until it’s not, marred by its predictability. 

There are a few sweet moments written in: Catherine’s fraught but profound relationship with her ​“bughouse” father, her sense of total agency with Hal and her sister, a constellation of scenes in which certainty trumps everything else. It’s those that director Steve Scarpa and the four-person cast zero in on, and we as audience members are lucky for it. Shaboo, whose depiction of a nervous but adoring father in Smudge so tickled audiences last year, fits Hal’s smart and funny persona, playing up academic jokes and dorky eyewear in just the right way. Nicol-Blifford is so, so good as a needling, casually ignorant Claire — perhaps the hardest role in the play, for its layers of antagonism and moneyed privilege -— and George Kulp is the just-right father figure, who we learn to love ambivalently in a series of spliced-in flashbacks. Chenot, meanwhile, is a fully embodied and spot-on Catherine, walking that extraordinary and maddening tightrope of self-doubt and self-realization that is being a twentysomething.

It’s her depiction of someone we all know intimately, someone we have all been at one point, that makes the play required watching. When she launches into a conversation about her future — a future full of question marks — when she seduces Hal, corralling all of her self-control and probably most of his, when she announces herself and her intellect without apology or compromise, she makes a point very clear. The best answer will always come with a little bit of uncertainty. That’s all the proof she needs.