It's in the pudding
Proof delivers on its reputation
REVIEW
PROOF
Alberta Theatre Projects
Runs until September 28
Martha Cohen Theatre (CPA)
Here’s hoping that Alberta Theatre Projects hasn’t peaked too early this season.
Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for best play, David Auburn’s Proof kicks off ATP's 30th anniversary season with a heavyweight cast, featuring local favourites Duval Lang, Barbara Gates Wilson and Meg Roe.
Despite its successes, Proof is the most unlikely of Broadway hits. It’s a play about a grieving daughter, her crazy mathematician daddy, her control-freak sister and a geeky math student. It’s a domestic drama in which a young woman under pressure has to decide what she will do with her life. It’s a script about mathematics and the life of university professors.
A play about mathematicians may sound dry, but playwright Auburn ties all of this together in a series of lively and involving confrontations.
Catherine (Roe) has spent the last several years looking after her father, Robert (Lang), a math genius who suffered from mental problems that had him wandering in the snow in his pyjamas and seeing alien messages in the bar codes on library books. When the play begins, Catherine is at a crossroads, trying to decide what she will do with her life. Touched by her father’s talent with numbers, a future in academia is a distinct possibility.
Her overbearing sister, Claire (Gates Wilson), arrives to "take care of her" and, with the best of intentions, demands immediate decisions about her future. One of her father’s former students, the math geek Hal (Winnipeg actor Rylan Wilkie), shows up to to see if Robert’s notebooks contain any valuable number-crunching discoveries that might help his own career.
Director Vanessa Porteous has put together a strong cast and uses them to advantage. Lang has the biggest challenge – he has to create a sympathetic portrait of a math prof, all fatherly affection and concern. Then he has to shatter that with surprising moments of hallucination and lunatic mood swings. It’s an intense performance that provides a strong base for the play.
Barbara Gates Wilson is equally intense as Claire, but hers is an irritating intensity as she tries to make up for the fact that she left Catherine to look after their father. Claire is demanding and overbearing from the first moment she whisks in and takes over.
Roe made headlines at this year’s Betty Mitchell Awards and Proof shows why. As the anguished young Catherine, Roe's performance is the soul of the play. At times she's a gangling, anti-social adolescent, and at others a snobbish know-it-all, but she's always riveting. As a young woman trying to cope both with tremendous loss and with the possibility that she may have inherited her father's illness along with his genius, Catherine is a character you feel sorry for and admire at the same time.
Wilkie has the difficult task of putting a sympathetic face on Hal, the math nerd. Hal is a doctoral candidate on the lookout for material to make his name. He hangs around in order to search through Robert’s notes looking for that special something. Combined with the career pressure is his awkward puppy-love approach to Catherine, which will give hope to academic dweebs everywhere.
Much has been written about Proof as a play exploring the male-dominated world of mathematics and the difficulty women have had gaining acceptance. This is definitely a part of it, but like the discussion of math itself, it is not the central concern. Proof deftly skewers academic sexism, but it isn’t a message play or an activist piece. Mathematics and even academia are simply the exotic context for Catherine’s journey, a very human struggle that will be familiar to almost anyone. |
