Broadway review: Ayo Edebiri shows her work in Proof
Broadway review by Adam Feldman
Rating: ★★★ (three stars)
Ticketing: Buy tickets to Proof
“Mathematicians are insane,” says Hal (Jin Ha), in what could be the tag line for David Auburn’s Proof. What Hal means is that he and his fellow geeks party too hard, but the statement resonates beyond that. His former mentor at the University of Chicago, Robert (Don Cheadle), was a math legend who revolutionized his field in his early 20s—“There’s this fear that your creativity peaks around 23 and it’s all downhill from there”—but went mad shortly thereafter. That’s very much on the troubled mind of Robert’s daughter, Catherine (Ayo Edebiri), on the night of her 25th birthday. She has inherited her father’s mathematical mind; has she also inherited his mental illness? When she discusses this concern with her dad in the haunting opening scene, he tries to be reassuring. But it’s unusual that they’re talking at all, since—as Robert reveals—he has been dead for a week. As he points out, gently: “It could be a bad sign.”
Bang! Q.E.D. And with Robert’s scene-ending line, Proof is off racing. Although its subject is advanced number theory, Auburn’s approach to mathematics is abstract. There’s an intellectual atmosphere, but this is not a Tom Stoppard play of heavy ideas; it’s an ingeniously crafted psychological thriller that continually toys with audience expectations—there are dizzying sequences of minor reversals, zigzagging within single scenes—and sustains suspense through the depth of its characters. Proof’s impeccable original New York production, starring Mary-Louise Parker, was directed by Daniel Sullivan at the height of his gift at creating the smartest possible versions of the works in his charge; four plays that he helmed between 1988 and 2007 won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, including this one. But the current Broadway revival, directed by Thomas Kail, demonstrates that Auburn’s play doesn’t need flawless staging to work. A great production can lift it to a higher level, but the clever design of the show makes it largely director-proof.
The revival’s most interesting innovation is to make Catherine and her family Black, which casts her position in a slightly different light. A key question in the plot concerns the moody and socially malfunctional Catherine’s mathematical prowess: Can her confidence in her own abilities be trusted? One strike against her is the fact that the world of higher mathematics is overwhelmingly male; there are exceptions such as the 18th-century Frenchwoman Sophie Germain, who shares Catherine’s fascination with prime numbers, but not many. As a Black woman, she is even more of a rarity in the field—and that adds to her isolation and defensiveness, her fury at not being believed. You can imagine her being dismissed as “too much,” and see how frustrating that would be for a mathematician who longs to equal her father’s famously elegant mathematical proofs while she is still, if only barely, in her prime.
What complicates this reading is the fact that Edebiri, in her stage debut, really is doing too much, especially at the beginning and the end of the play. She has comic chops and a deeply sympathetic presence, but as a theater performer she is still a little wet; she overplays Catherine’s craziness, and she struggles at times to make her choices seem natural. By contrast, Cheadle’s Robert, the “bughouse” professor who fills dozens of notebooks with gibberish, is at ease but sometimes mellow to a fault. The more seasoned Broadway actors have the run of the stage: Ha’s Hal is layered and endearing, and Kara Young—as Catherine’s bougie and bossy sister, Claire, a currency analyst—is terrific as always, spinning out inventive riffs of comedic business while also conveying genuine concern. (Is there nothing the dazzling Young can’t do?) They all have moments, but the equilibrium is off, and the pace lags when Claire is offstage. I would be interested to see Proof later in the run, when Edebiri has relaxed into her role and the production has had more time to work out the lumps, the approximations, the spots where you can see the stitches. It gets where it needs to go; what it lacks, at least for now, is elegance.
Proof. Booth Theatre (Broadway). By David Auburn. Directed by Thomas Kail. With Ayo Edebiri, Don Cheadle, Kara Young, Jin Ha. Running time: 2hrs 15mins. One intermission.
Buy tickets to Proof: Broadway.com
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