Liz Lauren
A woman sits in a chair and a man crouches beside her on a cluttered porch.
Kelsey Brennan, left, and David Daniel in APT's 'Proof'
When it comes to the great mysteries of the universe — and to the quiet mysteries of human connection, achievement and desire — how can we ever know, truly, what we know?
That's the question at the heart of David Auburn's Proof, an excellent and intimate production of which is closing out the American Players Theatre's 2023 season this month, with performances through Nov. 19. (Tickets are still available, but are limited.)
The story centers around Catherine (Kelsey Brennan), freshly 25, facing down an unknown future after the death of her father, Robert (David Daniel). Catherine, we learn, dropped out of school to care for Robert, a world-renowned mathematician, after he became gripped by a mental illness that had him seeking patterns in the spines of library books.
Her caretaking duties now suddenly over, Catherine is afraid that her own mind may likewise betray her. She finds a sparring partner in Hal (Nate Burger), an undistinguished student in Robert's former department at the University of Chicago. Hal is going through Robert's old papers, hoping to find some evidence of lost genius among the detritus of mania. Catherine is suspicious of his motives but also attracted to him, and he confesses harboring feelings for her in return.
It turns out that math requires proof. But matters of the heart require faith.
Uninterested in gray areas or unresolved queries is Catherine's type A sister Claire (Laura Rook), who swoops in from New York with nary a hair out of place and a clear plan of action for what will become of her sister and her decaying Hyde Park home. When Hal discovers an astonishing, perhaps generationally defining, mathematical proof tucked away in the house, the three must reckon with how they understand the nature of genius, work and obligation.
In a plot that moves across time, revelations unspool carefully, thanks to crisp direction by Brenda DeVita, the company's artistic director. She is helped by a Pulitzer-winning script that clues the audience in to secrets as it depicts a temporary break in Robert's madness four years prior.
On opening night in late October, the audience reacted appreciatively to the story's twists and turns, and to jokes that seemed tailor-made to a Midwestern crowd, with digs at Wisconsin wine and Northwestern's football program.
The small cast is excellent — a weak link could have sunk the delicate dynamics — and is anchored by Brennan's Catherine, a woman at war with herself. In a play that questions the very nature of knowledge, Brennan plays Catherine with shades of deep self-assuredness and sharpness that are sometimes bowed by grief — for her father, for her potential. Refracted through her sister's severity and her father's renown, she loses her footing again and again. But Brennan also brings her back to herself, again and again.
This is a story of a woman looking for evidence of who she is and how to be, and it is also a love letter to the slog behind any creative act, including the painful, sometimes impossible-seeming work of constructing a sense of self, and a purposeful life.
And while most people who attend this show won't be dogged by centuries-old mathematical queries, we are all beset by the human ones. How best to care for a sick relative? How to build a new romantic connection? How to break out of a troubled family dynamic?
At least mathematics offers a promise of "elegant" proofs. There is no such epistemological certainty in life. All anyone can do is work it through, and try to make repair after the fact, if they can.
At the height of his mathematical prowess, Robert shares that he could divine secrets of the universe from the details of ordinary days. "If I wanted to look for information — secrets, complex and tantalizing messages — I could find them all around me," he says. "In the air, in a pile of fallen leaves some neighbor rakes together, in box scores in the paper, written in the steam coming up off a cup of coffee."
But the world spoke to him just as vividly, we learn, at the height of his illness. This play grapples with the line between genius and insanity. It seems the very act of making sense of our lives can be its own kind of madness. So is love — but if we are lucky enough to be truly known by another person, we see ourselves better, too.
Lending to the production's spellbinding effect is stage design by Lawrence E. Moten III, which transports us to a tree-lined academic enclave in south Chicago, with an abstract rendering of pages overhead, reminiscent of the spiraling patterns in Robert's mind. Coupled with warm lighting design by Jason Lynch, it makes for a distinctly cozy evening.
To hear Robert describe it, the work of mathematics is a kind of reverie. This production of Proof invites its audiences to become equally transported by an intimate moment of art.
