Theater Review—

‘Proof’ Is Excellent All Around

By Julie Stern

RIDGEFIELD — It isn’t often that a local theater group is able to stage a remarkable play with an outstanding director who is able to obtain brilliant performances from his actors.

Happily, that is the case with the Ridgefield Theater Barn’s production of David Auburn’s Proof.

Like Margaret Edson’s 1997 drama Wit, which used the conceits of metaphysical poetry to infuse a story about a literature professor facing terminal cancer, with layers of intellectual and emotional meaning, Auburn’s Proof links an abstruse mathematical question to problems of emotional trust and self doubt.

Set on the sagging back porch of a south-side Chicago row house, the play centers around the tormented figure of Catherine, the younger daughter of a recently deceased professor from the University. Once recognized as the most brilliant mathematician of his time, Robert developed paranoid schizophrenia (much like the protagonist of the movie A Beautiful Mind) and spent his days compulsively searching for secret coded messages in the Dewey Decimal numbers on the backs of library books, filling hundreds of notebooks with scribbled nonsense.

Rather than allow her beloved father to be warehoused in an institution, Catherine dropped out of college and has spent the last ten years as his sole caretaker and companion. With his death, she is suddenly alone, without direction in her life, and fearful that she is detecting signs that she is inheriting his illness.

Into this situation come two very different figures: Hal is a graduate student who got to know and admire Robert four years earlier, during a temporary remission of his madness. He wants permission to search through Robert’s notebooks in the hope of finding some remnants of  unpublished genius among the ramblings.

Catherine’s older sister Claire is a smug, manipulative yuppie who has plans to sell the house and take Catherine back to New York, where she can  have “lots of fun” and be “treated” for her eccentricities by “the best doctors.”

As Hal and Catherine fumble toward a relationship on the evening of Robert’s funeral, she tells him the story of Marie Sophie Germain, a self-educated French woman in the 18th Century who was the most important female mathematician of all time, but who was able to have her work published only by sending it off in the form of letters, ostensibly written by a young man.

This foreshadows the dramatic crux of the story: Catherine entrusts Hal with a notebook containing a “proof” of Germain’s theorem, a monumental mathematical achievement. When she tells him that it was she, herself who wrote it, Claire accuses her of lying, and asserts that their father must have done it during his lucid period. Hal must decide who to believe, and what to do.

Elise Bochinski gives a gallant and heart wrenching performance as the lonely, frightened, troubled Catherine. Brave and decent, foul mouthed and paranoid by turns, she makes you care so much about this young woman who has inherited so much of her father’s intelligence, but potentially also his madness, and who gets neither attention nor respect for her abilities.

Stacey Mesler gives us a Claire who is complex enough not to be evil. Merely self centered and absorbed, she truly believes her own version of the situation, seeing herself as the competent, worldly success who has come back to Chicago to fix everything in ways that she sees fit.

Jeremy Funke is appealing and believable as a perennial graduate student who is neither as good a mathematician as he had once aspired to be, nor a faithful enough lover to be willing to trust without first seeing proof.

Frederic Tisch, playing Robert in his lucid moments, conveys the genius in a way that makes it easy to understand why students – and his daughter – loved him so much, while also capturing the agony of a beautiful mind that is struggling to work amidst the ravages of mental illness.

All together this is a superb production, gripping and powerful, and flawlessly performed. It’s a must see.

(Performances continue on weekends until October 7. Contact the theater barn at 203-431-9850 for full production details.)