Rating: 
Summary: Takes Me Back to the Walter Kerr Theater
Review: In the past few years there has been a resurgence of plays with themes centered around math and science and characters who are mathematicians and scientists. Thank heaven! Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen" is magnificent. Then there are two plays produced by the Manhattan Theater Club: "An Experiment with an Air Pump" by Shelagh Stephenson and this play, "Proof" by David Auburn. I think both are wonderful.After winning the Pulitzer, a shot at a Tony, and a continuing run on Broadway, Auburn really has no need for my good words; however, let me give a few anyway. This is a cleverly written piece. Unlike "Copenhagen," this play really isn't about mathematicians and scientists. It is just framed around them. No math skills are necessary to enjoy this play. Instead, it is an examination of love, trust, madness and genius presented through the lives of mathematicians. In fact, the only weakness in this play is when real mathematics comes up. I cringed when I heard the famous exchange between mathematicians G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan put in the mouth of Robert and Catherine, the father/daughter mathematicians at the heart of this play. It just rubbed me the wrong way. Fortunately, this is the only time math actually comes up. Instead, this play takes us into the lives of four very interesting people. I was fortunate enough to see a performance of this play on its second night on Broadway. I was incredibly moved. Mary-Louise Parker's performance as Catherine was particularly impressive. Reading the script, I was carried right back to the theater and could relive the experience again. I loved it.
Rating:
Summary: A CHALLENGING, ENTERTAINING PLAY
Review: Not since David Hirson's brilliant La Bete and Wrong Mountain has Broadway seen a more exciting play than Proof! I recommend this book to anyone who appreciates theatre that is as challenging as it is entertaining. I sent many friends to see the original production, and none was disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: Also won the Pulitzer Prize
Review: Proof also won the Pulitzer Prize. I didn't see it performed, but I read it, and I liked it. OK, I was a math major, and I am from Chicago, so maybe I am biased.
If you really get into this book, you would like _A Beautiful Mind_, by Sylvia Nasar, which is a biography of John Nash. I think the older mathematician, the crazy one, in this play is based on Nash. Nash was or is schizophrenic. He won the Nobel Prize for Economics and when he went to Stockholm to pick it up some people were afraid he might bite the King of Sweden. He was or is in remission at that time; don't know what shape he is in now. Read the Nasar book too.
Rating:
Summary: A Realistic Balance
Review: Proof was a very enjoyable play to watch and reading it makes me recall how much I liked watching it. Sad, but often funny, it is a drama with a sense of humor.
Rating:
Summary: Great To Read, Great To See
Review: The story of Proof somehow jumped at me like no other play had before. I have seen the play twice. I didn't see it in New York, but I saw the first regional production of the play at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta. This produciton starred Susan Pourfar as Catherine. Susan Pourfar breathed so much life into this role that now when I read it, the show takes on new meaning. The story is new and REAL. Proof tells the story of the life of Catherine and the people most near her. Buy this book you won't regret it!
Rating:
Summary: Funny and moving
Review: This is a wonderful play. I have seen it twice on Broadway and am now very eager for a chance to read it myself. It is an incredably funny but at the same time very real and moving story about a 25 year old girl who has perhaps inherated some of her mathematition father's genius and perhaps some of his madness. It is about how she and her older sister dealt differantly with their father's instability, and how they deal differantly with grief over his death. It is about a student of the father who is going through his notebooks after his death, and it is a mystery about the actual author of an amazing proff he finds. You know what, it's just really really good. I don't know what else to say but that. :)
Rating:
Summary: Prove It To Me.
Review: This is a wonderful, well-thought out play. The cast consists of only four characters and the plot moves back and forth in time from the present to the past and from dreams to reality. Catherine's father, Robert (who seems loosely based on the real-life John Nash) was one of the most brilliant mathematicians to have ever lived. By the time he was 25 he had changed the mathematics world twice. Then he became mentally sick and his brilliant and beautiful daughter Catherine drops out of school to take care of him. Robert dies, but Catherine has inherited some of his gifts. Though she was forced to drop out of college, she, too is a mathematical genius. The only problem is that her "boyfriend" Hal and her older sister Claire think she has also inherited some of Robert's dementia.
What starts off as a play seemingly about mathematics and the effects of dementia ends up really being a piece of theatrical genius about love and family. A great show if done right.
Rating:
Summary: Proof the play is proof what flawless drama should be.
Review: To use hyperbole to express onto readers the profundity and intelligence or 'mother wit' of this play would not do it a hint of justice, but rather, it would be another run-of-the-mill complementary liturgy. It won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. And that alone speaks volumes. Using an atmosphere or background in which mathematics is prevalent - but not entirely so in respects to clearly jotted out theorems and formulas (for everything that is math oriented in this drama is rather undefined and ambigous) - the play's theme(s) gyrate around one central character: twenty-five-year-old Catherine, her dad's care provider and an unknown math genius and three strong supporting characters, sometimes very aseptic and in other turns quite audacious: Robert, the Dad, a former math professor/academic math celebrity, in his fifties, Hal, twenty-five, a semi-carefree educator and graduate student under Robert and lastly, Claire, twenty-nine, a nagging sister to Catherine and daughter of Robert. When one thinks of super bookishly or scholastically (research-wise, that is) gifted individuals, it is normally believed that folks of this nature tend to lean towards the sidelines - to a realm of reflective alienation and unavoidable, suffocating derangement: madness through and through. This is a commonly held perception that is strongly associated to those rare math demigods/goddesses. They are deemed (but not always) as shy, introverted, awkward, asexual social oddities who are mentally a tad off kilter in the world of beer slurping, vulgar/inelegant party celebrants. However, the Hal character in the play mitigates that academic myth.... Proof, in essence, is almost written like a mathematical illustration or equation. The play - scene by scene - is broken up like a puzzle; it flutters backward and forward. And you have to go back, like in a math problem, in order to solve it. Whatever Proof is, there is no denying that it is a startling, shotgunning drama that is worthy of vast readership. That alone is the highest complement one can pay to an author.
Rating:
Summary: "Proof"
Review: When I had to read a play for my drama class, my drama teacher handed me this play which I didn't have much hope for. Though it quickly changed my mind as I read this wonderful story about two sisters coping with a fathers death. I LOVE "Proof"!!! Thank you sooo much Mr. Auburn!!!
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