An Analysis of the play, Proof

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The four characters are Catherine, a woman in her mid-twenties who looks after her brilliant yet unstable mathematician father, her sister Claire who regularly resides in New York, and Harold (or “Hal”) who was a student of Catherine’s father at the University of Chicago. The show opens late at night. Catherine is sleeping on her porch and is surprised by the sudden appearance of her father. He is a mathematician, and she has evidently inherited a talent for mathematics but is not pursuing it. We discover that her father’s funeral is the next day and that it is also her twenty-fifth birthday, she was daydreaming his visit. A male student of her father’s, Hal, appears from the study, saying that someone must examine the dead man’s notebooks. When Catherine discovers he has pilfered one, she is furious and calls the police. They arrive as the scene ends. During the next few scenes � which jump back and forth between the present and the past � we learn that the girl had left her classes at her university to take care of her father, while he gradually sank into delusion. Hal returns for the wake, and Catherine and Hal spend the night together. The next morning Catherine gives him the key to a drawer which contains a stunning mathematical proof. Catherine tells him that she wrote it, however, he and Catherine’s older sister, Claire, are skeptical. Claire, who lives in New York City, has arranged to sell their father’s house and to move Catherine to New York, where she can find psychiatric care. The sisters fear the young mathematician is going to take after her father. We are given evidence that the father could not have written the proof. Hal returns, having become convinced that the proof is valid and that Catherine did, indeed, write it. In the last scene, Catherine seems ready to quit mathematics and follow her sister to New York, but Hal entreats her to talk him through the proof. And as the final scene ends, she picks up the notebook and begins to describe what remains to be done before the proof will be publishable. Proof is a deceptively simple play, with meanings at many levels, and its author not only makes us care about the characters, but he makes us care because they are mathematicians. So, on the surface, Proof is a play about mathematicians, not about mathematics. But it calls upon our feelings about mathematics�our feelings that mathematicians are possessed by a sensibility that separates them from the rest of us. What Auburn gets us to care about is the human being, not the science. What moves us is human dilemma. This drama seems to end in ambiguity. The father’s role, and his life, have been defined, but Catherine and Hal, still very much alive, are wrapped in a web of uncertainty. We are convinced that Catherine wrote the proof, and therefore has much talent, but we have no idea what she will make of it�nor are we convinced that she should pursue it if this entails the risk of following her father into delusion. Which brings me to the question of does the playwright expect us to believe such a risk exists? Mathematics has provided the context for their lives, but it offers no clues to their fate.

Something that stood out to me, at least visually and in the context of this particular production alone, was the multi-colored mobile hanging on the porch. To me, this contraption consisting of a multitude of different shapes, none of them perfect angles, symmetrical or at all orderly, seemed a brilliant prop�at least, poetically�as a touching visual of a mathematician’s mind (I can only guess). An event that stood out to me and perhaps perplexed me is when we find out that Catherine has written this oh-so-brilliant mathematical proof about prime numbers. She knows it’s a big deal, but what were her intentions with it? She spent her free time writing and figuring out something no other mathematician to date had been able to figure out, yet she locks it away seemingly never to let it surface while she was alive (that is until Hal came around). Her intentions were something that both perplexed and intrigued me. What did writing this proof mean to her? Perhaps that’s when the double entendre comes in with the title. Perhaps she had to prove her capabilities to herself�or perhaps prove to herself just how much she really had inherited from her father, making the possibility of inheriting his madness as well more of a believable circumstance.

I found this play very enjoyable and intriguing, as well as having a contemporary edge to it that I found refreshing. The dialogue was fast-paced and smart, and for being a production based around the mathematical world, it was a deceptively simple show. I believe this is because it wasn’t a show about mathematics, but a show about mathematicians and their own humanity and relationships to each other. They are portrayed as a different breed, and in my experience with them they most definitely are, which is interesting to base a drama around. Things are complex, but perhaps they enjoy the quagmire of instability that haunts their profession and in this depiction, their lives. I felt moved by the relationship between Catherine and her father, and sorry for her when she had to give up years off her own young life to care for her mentally ill father. I sympathize with her, not truly being able to imagine what it would be like or how much pain it would cause to see someone you love so dearly slip through the cracks, while you’re totally helpless knowing that it’s all out of your control�that there’s nothing you can do to stop it. It is clear that it has taken a harsh toll on Catherine’s own stability, and in that I am inclined to feel very deeply for her situation at such a young age.

All in all, this show was delightful and entertaining to watch, as well as thought provoking. Many topics remain uncertain, such as the fine line between genius and madness and the idea of such traits being inheritable. I like that there was uncertainty in this show, because if this show were a mathematical equation, there would be no fine line, and no uncertainty. There would only be truth. Once again, Auburn relates this show to the lives of mathematicians, not mathematics itself, which is an entirely different equation. Nothing is actually proven in the brief glimpse into the life of Catherine, just accepted.






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