By Omar Tanamly (January 23, 2005)

Recommended to me by a friend, I approached Proof by David Auburn without many expectations, knowing only that it dealt loosely with math, but was more focused on the struggling relationships of one troubled young woman. Set in most part on a back porch in Chicago, the plot weaves in and out of the present, often going back for whole scenes to previous events which shed some light on the relationship between Catherine, the jaded, worn-out, cynical main character, and her brilliant but unbalanced late father Robert.

Recently deceased, Robert was well past the peak of his intellectual career as an esteemed mathematician, but who had left behind over a hundred notebooks of the notes he had detailed in his final years. Catherine is also a mathematician yet we are left relatively uninformed of the bond the two shared. Flaky and with no concrete plans or goals, Catherine’s life is further disturbed by the arrival of her sister Claire, who, being her complete opposite, wants more than anything to shape her sister’s life before it falls apart any further.

To add additional complication to the already unhinged balance, Auburn inserts Hal into the mix, a former student of Robert who longs both to discover some sort of incredible mathematic revelation in the endless volumes of his idol’s work while winning the heart of the obstinately paranoid Catherine. From the controlling manner with which Claire seeks to decide her sister’s future and any of several halfway betrayals, Catherine experiences an assortment of emotional dilemmas, all of which seem to be more or less universal problems, ones which each of us is familiar with on some scale.

To begin with, for far too long Catherine has cared for her father, whose dedication to his profession always stays with him, while his intellectual stamina and basic mental power deteriorate. Catherine’s dedication to her father is not the cliché selfless adoration, but rather it seems she takes care of him because no one else will. Struggling to find anything else to live for, the extent of Catherine’s pursuit of mathematics is always left unclear, and it seems fitting that even as readers we can only go as far as to suspect that she is capable of awesome things.

Catherine trudges through life without the support of her father, who is regarded, despite his weakening condition, with almost demagogical esteem by the neighborhood group of elite math geeks, of whom Hal is one. The fundamental problem in Catherine’s relationships with other people is that for years, no one has appreciated whatever potential she has in her, so that even she has accepted her fate as a gloomy, eventless one. Can we not draw significant parallels to all sorts of characters, and indeed ourselves, with this inherent dilemma in Proof? While Catherine’s predicament has surfaced not merely from living in the shadow of her father and much more attractive sister Claire, they do indeed do damage to Catherine’s thoughts of self-worth.

With her father’s death, Catherine has nothing left for her and as the play begins with her sitting on her back porch drinking champagne alone, I as a reader can already somewhat sympathize with the her truly pathetic plight. Hal, the older and more focused college student, is upstairs digging through mile-high stacks of notebooks, probably thinking more towards the inevitable awkwardness of his impending exit for it is getting far too late and he knows he will happen upon Catherine, who had prefaced the encounter long ago by establishing herself as something of a formidable character.

After a deal of more or less one-sided blather, Catherine, drunk and suspicious, finds wrapped in Hal’s jacket a single notebook he had hoped to smuggle out of the attic. Adamant that nothing leave the house, Catherine had only moments before checked Hal’s bag and finding nothing, finally placed some trust in him. As it turns out, Hal, in his studies, had found some of Robert’s more personal writing about his daughter in the book, and knowing it was Catherine’s birthday, he had wanted to wrap it for her. Rash, drunk, and thoroughly convinced that he had been harboring ulterior motives all along, Catherine exploded and called the police. Feeling the effects of such a personal and face-to-face betrayal, she loses her cool for the first of many times throughout the 80-page play, less emblematic of her true character but more of her distrust of others.

Dealing with issues of respect, trust, and imposition throughout Proof, Catherine, to me, seems only the victim of an evolution of her unfortunate circumstance, which is only heightened by the confusing mix of emotions of her father’s death. Not knowing whether to simply mourn the death that had really happened years before, which had prompted Catherine’s almost continual care of her father, or to finally give some thought to her future, Catherine allows herself to be thrown about by a mixture of influences and emotions.

The thing that makes this play compelling is that it is, if nothing else, intensely and very realistically focused on the dynamics of a person’s character, specifically one who lives their life under the guise of a façade that isn’t too hard to unearth. Yet overall, the play showcases beautifully the difference between bare boned, brute propensity for mathematic conversions and the trickiness of dealing with people, while taking their emotions into consideration. Throughout the play, Catherine remains passive enough that other people can almost reach the point of getting their way with her until her voice of reason and experience speak up and she comes off as confrontational and belligerent.

Yet truly, Proof tells the tale of a lost woman, who hasn’t received the respect she deserves, from an array of impersonal acquaintances as well as herself, and it’s only when she, and those around her, are able to come to terms with the fact that she has inherited a substantial portion of both her father’s madness and intellect that she will be content.