Play Review: David Auburn's Proof

Given the current playwrighting trend of pushing the envelope, trying new things and abandoning old traditions, Proof stands out for its accessibility. In a move perhaps bolder than the risk takers of his time, David Auburn has written a play that will either survive or fall on his words. The first and most important lesson that playwright ought to take from Proof is that risk taking must have a purpose.

It is too easy to start with a structure, a way of telling a story and find characters and a plot that conform to that structure. Your story, however, is forced; it exists to fit your structure. As a writer, you must know your characters and understand why they are doing what they do. Only then can you decide the best way to tell their story. For Kushner, risk taking became an enhancement, for Auburn, it would have been a distraction.

Still, we ought to take notice of the exceptional and the unique in Auburn's play. It is a two act play, with the two acts in direct reference to his title. Proofs are made up of two parts: question and answer, and Proof is no different. The first act is a question, albeit a long one with several parts. The play's last line belongs to Catherine ("I wrote it.") and it establishes our question: did she? The second act is the complicated answer to his complicated question.

A second unique aspect of Proof is Auburn's use of the dead father. The father opens the play in a rather unimpressive manner. It makes sense that he is there; we understand his role and Catherine's feelings for him. By allowing us to think that the father is real, Auburn allows us to understand some of Catherine and Claire's loss for their father. Like them, we look back and remember when he was there. The father's presence also makes him human and prevents us from writing him off as a lunatic, as someone incapable of a normal conversation.

Obviously, the comparisons between mathematics and the play don't stop with its structure. Approaching a mathematical proof and approaching life are similar; more than genius or talent, both take perseverance, a willingness to stick with things. To be successful at both requires a broad way of looking at things, attacking at different angles until solutions present themselves. But there is also, necessarily, one crucial difference between the two and it is for this reason that the best mathematicians, the most talented, are often unstable as people. Life can't be solved. As complicated and elaborate as a math problem can be, in the end, it is a means to a solution. To think that life is leading somewhere, that it has a direction and a solution, is insanity.

The hope for Catherine lies in her ability to find elegance in her proof. She is to concerned with the functionality of her proof, how it works and why. As the play ends, she and Hal are looking at what she has accomplished, and he urges her to look at her proof in pieces, to hopefully find the elegance that can only be seen by breaking it down into smaller moments. Life, by comparison, is a series of moments. We stay sane by cherishing the moments, not by thinking of life as a journey with only one destination.

Will Catherine get better? Will she go to New York? Do she and Hal have a future? If the play were truly a mathematical proof, we would have these answers. In life, however, and in Proof, we do not.