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Proof
Reviewed by Paul Birchall
Moth Theatre Company
Through Feb. 15
Playwright David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize winning drama about love, grief, and higher mathematics gets a solid, if not prime (in the Gaussian sense) staging in director John Markland’s elegiac production. Markland’s production emphasizes subtext and psychology over blocking, with the result that the show seems more conversational than composed – a decision that gives the show a sort of truthfulness that nevertheless negates some of the theatricality needed to connect with the viewer. It sometimes prevents the show from achieving, let’s say, the integer X, when X is the best possible version of all versions of Auburn’s play.
Catherine (Amanda Brooks) has spent the last several years caring for her increasingly ill and dementia-afflicted father Robert (John Cirigliano), a former genius University of Chicago mathematician who has just died. Steeped in grief, Catherine must come to grips with the fact that her life, on hold for a long time, is now in her own hands. Different life options are offered by Hal (Chris Marquette), an ambitious former student of her father’s, who has always nursed an affection for Catherine, and by her brittle, pragmatic older sister Claire (Felicity Price), who wants her to move to New York. Adding to Catherine’s emotional conflict is Hal’s finding, hidden in one of Robert’s desk drawers, a mathematical proof that could change the way people think about math.
Auburn’s play is about loss and maturity – and also about the longing and recovery of those left behind, particularly when those left behind were relegated to the shadows of the one who is gone. Markland does a fine job of capturing the mood of grief, just after the death of a loved one, in which the bereaved often finds oneself assailed by outsiders with agendas frighteningly different from one’s own. The play is also, incidentally, a love song to the city of Chicago – and to the University of Chicago in particular, with its emphasis on unrealizable desire and the tragedy of gaining academic wisdom without being truly wise.
The staging emphasizes the emotional undercurrents motivating dialogue, creating a mood that’s organic and conversational. The tone is overall is sweetly, sensitively mournful — but, while it’s intermittently evocative, it’s also too languidly paced, bordering on the listless, overly full of pregnant pauses and moments in which very little happens on stage. The result is a drama that boasts multi-dimensional characterizations but which is nevertheless occasionally too dramatically inert.
Still, Brooks hits just the right equation of anger, sadness, and confusion as the grieving daughter. Marquette’s mild, yet passionate Hal is charming – and Price’s turn as the bossy-boots older sister is surprisingly identifiable and sympathetic. Appearing in ghostly flashback sequences, Cirigliano’s performance as the dying father powerfully captures the sense of a genius in crumbling decline.
Moth Theater, 4359 Melrose Avenue, L.A.; Thurs.- Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; through Feb 15. (323) 609-3676, Moththeatre.com.
