Proof: A Play by David Auburn Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Proof: A Play
Book Review: An intellectual inspiration
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm glad I saw this one on a stage. This play is an emotional experience that jumps back and forth over five years in the lives of four people. Mathematics is the field within which individual creative activity is sought, but the interesting question about thought at such a high level is how anyone could establish authorship of anything that is authentically new if the circumstances allow some ambiguity. The big joke in the play is about a young mathematician who is drummer in a rock band that performs an imaginary number. It helps if the viewer is familiar with the movie "A Beautiful Mind," as the young mathematician-rock-drummer would be an ideal imaginary character if this play was about John Nash, as seeing people in that movie was not always proof that they existed. The real question that hangs over the future in this play is how crazy anyone is likely to be in the short run and the long run, or if they can muddle through the emotional times without too much of some of the worst alcoholic beverages ever to be mentioned on a stage anywhere.Book Review: Auburn Proves Himself
Summary: 4 Stars
In Proof, Auburn has written a wonderful play, taking on some very key characteristics of humanity. Especially wonderful is the father-daughter relationship between Robert and Catherine. However, just as intriguing are the relationships between sisters Catherine and Claire, and between Hal and Catherine.Auburn hits strong notes on most issues, including trust, duty, love, and sanity. After reading the play, it should be quite clear why it won the Pulitzer.
This is a first-rate drama, and I would dare to list in up with plays by Ibsen and Chekov. The only reason I omitted the fifth star is purely subjective, in that I did not feel Claire's character was fully developed.
Book Review: Book Review on Proof
Summary: 5 Stars
I started reading this book at a stranager's house but couldn't finish. Thank goodness Amazon had it so I now I know the purpose and ending. The stranger's copy looked so beat up that I didn't think the book existed anywhere else. It's a good play and easy to read.Book Review: Brilliant, and yet...
Summary: 4 Stars
Proof, by David Auburn, is a compelling and tautly beautiful play, ringing with a quiet elegance. Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play, I was introduced to it through the 2005 movie, which now having read the play I realize was an extremely good adaptation, as well as a very good film in its own right. It's the story of Catherine, a brilliant but somewhat neurotic mathematics student who has lived all her life in the shadow of her famous father, a groundbreaking mathematician revered the world over. The play begins with a dialogue between Catherine and her father, in which he berates her for wasting her potential, while gradually, during the course of it, we discover that her father is insane, and has been for quite some time. He is living in semi-seclusion while Catherine looks after him. Then, as the conversation goes on, we - and Catherine - realize that her father is dead; as he calmly informs her "Heart failure. Quick. The funeral's tomorrow." From there, we are slowly sucked into a drama of at once deep intensity and lyrical lightness. Abruptly deprived of the man who, for better or worse, was the center of her existence for all her life, Catherine finds herself having to cope with life and relationships beyond her father, as Harold, a graduate student of her father's, begins going through all her father's journals to see if by some chance he wrote anything significant during his recent years of insanity. Catherine, immediately defensive and certain that her father wrote nothing but graphomaniac scribbles during the last few years, throws him out of the house. Claire is the fourth person in this coterie, Catherine's domineering, overly-careful sister, who ran out on both her father and Catherine years ago(although supporting them financially) and is now determined to drag her "troubled" little sister back with her to New York and fix her up. As half the story is told in flashbacks to scenes betweens Catherine and her father when he was still alive, these make up the four main characters.
Three of the four main characters are mathematicians, and while there is little or no actual math in the play it is still a mathematicians dream(in much the same way Possession is a poet's/writer's dream). One of the many funny moments of the play consists of Hal's band playing a song composed entirely of silence, based on the imaginary number "I", a mathematician's joke.
Proof is a tale of many things; isolation, loneliness, love, hate, the clashing of wildly different characters from different worlds(Harold, more often called Hal, belongs to a band, and Catherin's sister doesn't understand math), and the love-hate relationships engendered within families. But mostly, it is about the quest for genius to find security and definition in a world untailored for fragile people, and to set free the impulse that drives that genius. Proof has an oddly breathless feel at times; as if both Catherine and her burgeoning talent hang in the balance between existence and destruction. In an blending of poetry, prose, and math, we discover her fate, of which the following passage(one of several turning points in the play) is a perfect example -
"Let X equal the cold. It is cold in December. The months of cold equal November through February. There are four months of cold and four of heat, leaving four months of indeterminate temperature. ...Let X equal the month of full bookstores. The number of books approaches infinity as the number of months of cold approaches four. I will be as cold now as I will in the future. The future of cold is infinite. The future of cold is the future of heat..."
Still, while Proof is a remarkable and luminous work, somehow it lacks something - the immensity of vision that I would expect from a Pulitzer-Prize-winning play. It is essentially about individuals, not ideas, and while to some extent this is true of all great literature, still Proof feels small, constrained within its own eclectic world. And there is no great tragedy, love story, or revelation about human nature to make up for this, to dominate it and lift it into a book that says something, a book that will join the pantheon of great literature. It has depth but not width. It's graceful and beautiful, clever and often funny - certainly memorable - but it is not an important work.
Book Review: Deserved its Pulitzer.
Summary: 4 Stars
David Auburn, Proof (Dramatists Play Service, 2001)
I spent a good deal of my elementary and junior high school years reading plays, as I fancied myself an actor back in the day. A somewhat bad actor, to be sure, but I did manage to score the role of Reb Nahum in our fifth-grade production of Fiddler on the Roof. (Go me!) Acting in theater, however small, gave me a taste for reading plays, and it was quite enjoyable. Somewhere along the way, though, I tailed off, and it has only been recently (as in, in the past month) I've rediscovered the pleasure of reading a stage play. Proof is the second one I've encountered since starting again, and if the quality of these two is anything to go by, I've obviously been missing out on quite a bit in the quarter-century I haven't been keeping up.
Proof is the story of a guy, a girl, and a mathematical equation. Which may not sound all that interesting when put that way, but it is. The girl is the daughter of a mathematical genius who suffered, while still young, a debilitating mental illness. (Think A Beautiful Mind without the paranoia and racism.) The guy is one of his doctoral students from the recent past, when he had a lucid year and briefly advised students at the local university again. The mathematical equation-- well, you'll just have to see, or read, the play.
In a very short span of pages (seventy-four, to be precise), Auburn creates two compelling characters (and a few equally compelling minor players), puts them into a situation, and gives us enough to care about them in the most minimal fashion possible; while there's too much going on for the brevity of the play to really focus on the two of them, the reader still comes to understand much about their depth and various quirks. (It's not for nothing this play won a Drama Pulitzer.) There's no real revelation here; it's almost as if Proof is actually the prequel to whatever it is Auburn really wants to write about these characters. But it works, and it works very well. Enjoyable, and highly recommended. ****