Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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32 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A CHALLENGING, ENTERTAINING PLAY, April 4, 2002
By A Customer
Not since David Hirson's brilliant La Bete and Wrong Mountain has Broadway seen a more exciting play than Proof! I recommend this book to anyone who appreciates theatre that is as challenging as it is entertaining. I sent many friends to see the original production, and none was disappointed.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Takes Me Back to the Walter Kerr Theater, May 20, 2001
In the past few years there has been a resurgence of plays with themes centered around math and science and characters who are mathematicians and scientists. Thank heaven! Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen" is magnificent. Then there are two plays produced by the Manhattan Theater Club: "An Experiment with an Air Pump" by Shelagh Stephenson and this play, "Proof" by David Auburn. I think both are wonderful.After winning the Pulitzer, a shot at a Tony, and a continuing run on Broadway, Auburn really has no need for my good words; however, let me give a few anyway. This is a cleverly written piece. Unlike "Copenhagen," this play really isn't about mathematicians and scientists. It is just framed around them. No math skills are necessary to enjoy this play. Instead, it is an examination of love, trust, madness and genius presented through the lives of mathematicians. In fact, the only weakness in this play is when real mathematics comes up. I cringed when I heard the famous exchange between mathematicians G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan put in the mouth of Robert and Catherine, the father/daughter mathematicians at the heart of this play. It just rubbed me the wrong way. Fortunately, this is the only time math actually comes up. Instead, this play takes us into the lives of four very interesting people. I was fortunate enough to see a performance of this play on its second night on Broadway. I was incredibly moved. Mary-Louise Parker's performance as Catherine was particularly impressive. Reading the script, I was carried right back to the theater and could relive the experience again. I loved it.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
There Is No Place In Life For Prime Numbers, August 29, 2006
It's a genuine pleasure to come across writing that sees clean sentences, never verbose, which aren't denotatively didactic but speak for themselves, even as they seem deceptively straightforward. Woody Allen's `Match Point' and Julian Fellowes's `Gosford Park' come to mind; and David Auburn's `Proof' finds itself in the same league.
Auburn's spare and humorous dialogue, along with his discreetly significant directions for staging, provides a number of starting points for consideration. Three, in particular, by which to anchor thought are Robert and Catherine's seeming obsession with prime numbers; how Robert, in spite of his infirmity, never fails to date his notebook entries correctly; and the nature of said expert's madness. This is a play where mathematics is the ink to the script of being.
Prime numbers are the central figurative device here. Indivisible save by one and by themselves, they are characterised by an absolute duality. Such definity in their mathematical nature mirrors the distinct black-and-white discreteness of an indubitable `yes' and `no', what's true and what's not. Everyone in this play is straining towards some manner of certainty, and the consistent preoccupation with prime numbers is emblematic of this. That there are 103 notebooks of Robert's writings to peruse is an inherent paradox in seeking some evidence of his talent with numbers enduring in the years that he's unwell, and of Catherine's aptitude, as she so claims to possess. The lives of Robert and Catherine are, quite literally, heavily informed numerically - as Robert tells his daughter, `even your depression is mathematical' - but if their lives were to be written with mathematics, there would be no place for prime numbers in the murky midst of workings in life that demand that people take risks.
Risks, however, are what Catherine is pessimistic of venturing. Her relationship with her father - strengthened and tested by living with him for twenty-five years - along with an understanding of his genius is a source of stability for her, something she can be sure of, something she can trust. With the mental decline of her father, that sense of security is shaken, and she begins second-guessing herself, afraid that she may be prone to the same psychological capriciousness she's observed in her father. She takes a gamble with classes at Northwestern, investing hope in, needing to trust to, the possibility of her father being `consistently well'. The risk she takes here doesn't pay off - Robert's condition deteriorates, she leaves having attended only a few lessons. The uncertainty over whether she can catch up is then compounded by depression following the death of her father. She then takes a risk with Hal, taking for granted that he would believe her claim to the authorship of a piece of groundbreaking mathematical proof and support her, which ends up backfiring. Without her father, Catherine finds herself isolated. Yet, what does she, importantly, do to keep herself centred, all those years she looks after her father in his senility? Mathematics, as we come to find out. After putting Robert to bed, after leaving that part of her life, riddled with doubt, behind, she slogs away at proving a theorem. Math reassures her that she is still sane, or at least reasonably lucid and logical, if not completely sensible, in addition to bolstering her dwindling confidence in herself as a mathematician, and as her father's daughter.
Math alone, however, is inadequate. As we see with Catherine, it helps the individual, but in corresponding and trying to connect with people, it becomes relatively impotent. In fact, it can even be misleading. Math convinces Hal of Robert's brilliance; it also acts as a blinker, till the end of the play, to the fact that Robert was in his last years incapacitated from accomplishing anything substantial, even in that fateful year when he seemed at his most clear-headed. A lack of knowledge about numbers and techniques similarly holds Claire back from grasping the possibility that Catherine was capable of such work. In the three-way argument between Hal, Claire and Catherine that seeks irrefutable, hard evidence, physical proof in numbers and writing, ironically, is dismissed, precisely because it's not enough.
The root of all concern, perpetuated quite presumptuously by Claire, though exacerbated by Catherine as well, lies with Robert's worsening mental health when he is alive. Even ability and, by extension, insanity turn out to be matters of numbers - Robert's state is the result of age; and he even reaffirms, by ironically pre-empting, what Hal tells Catherine about `your creativity (peaking) around twenty-three and it's all downhill from there' when he acknowledges the rusting of a `pretty good memory for numbers' as a `stereotype that unfortunately turns out to be true'. They actively identify different points in their lives by age, by numbers. Robert's condition seems to see his mind, of his own volition or otherwise, almost compulsively seeking painstakingly the satisfaction of feeling sure about something. That he mentions to Catherine in a scene of the second act his being `terrified' of not being able to work again tells us, despondently and, again, with grim irony, considering how that scene plays out, of a concern easily empathisable: The need to be able to keep trusting to our faculties, the `font' of our `inspiration', our clarity. For the greater part of this particular scene, Robert's mind appears to convince him that `the machinery' is indeed working meaningfully again, so much so that he gets worked up to a passion when Catherine initially refuses to discuss his supposed outline for a proof with him out in the cold. Without being conscious of it, it seems, he needs something absolute to get by. But after Catherine condescends to read through a few pages aloud, we see Robert, at first robust-looking, almost immune to the cold, gradually being crippled by it apparently as he begins to shiver, with the scene ending with him being less talkative than before, physically and mentally diminished within a matter of moments. The anaesthetic, as it were, of the rush of certainty is removed, and a sense of the cold sets in, paralleling the emergence of an awareness, on Catherine's part, if not Robert's, of the improbability of the latter being able to produce any real work, as well as a realisation on the part of the audience of the unlikelihood of Robert coming up with the mathematical proof at the centre of speculation. The accurate and consistent dating of his notebook entries, otherwise filled with figments of `landscapes' and models for work, empty shells strewn in the wake of his tragically fruitless attempts at solid results, seems sadly the one thing that stays fixed, stable, all that his mind can muster for the comforting impression of some form of immutability and certitude.
The last time we see Robert is when the illusion of certainty ends for him. The first time he appears is as an illusion, a spectre of Catherine's memory (or perhaps her own instability manifest), which is also how the play begins. The play ends, however, with a reasonable confirmation of Cathy being the writer of a proof about prime numbers. Prime numbers triumph at the play's conclusion: It seems something certain has finally been arrived at. Even then, Auburn manages something of a postscript, a comment on life, with Cathy's mathematical work, compared to her father's, as an oblique metaphor: This is a story, in part, about growing up, where age as suggested by numbers means nothing compared to an education derived from Catherine `living in (her) house for twenty-five years' with her father. Robert's `stuff was way more elegant. When he was young', yet, at the same age as her father when he was doing mathematics `like music', Catherine's work already comes off `lumpy', precisely because she's seen the `compromises' that have to be made with herself and that people have to make with each other, as well as the `approximations', hypotheses, hazarding chances and guesses, things taken solely on faith, such as `trust', in life through this entire episode. In the same way she sees only the `places where (the proof is) stitched together', she's seen the unevenness of life, of having to make the effort to `(connect) the dots' and finding out `how to get to the next one' without really ever knowing `if there (is) a next one'. Even within the bounds of truth on paper, we might need to grope in the dark to get to the things that are certain. It's here that mathematics and life find a consolatory confluence: The incontrovertible there certainly are - love; trust; meaning in the efforts we invest; ourselves - and, just like working to figure out the proof to a result you simply know to be undeniable, it's only a matter of getting there, even if the `lumpy' way turns out less than `elegant'.
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