The 2001 Tony winner for Best Play,
Proof ran for two and a half years on Broadway, had a national tour (rare for a non-musical), and was adapted into a 2005 film starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Jake Gyllenhaal. There have been several local productions, but not in 5+ years, so it was time to revisit this brilliant play, and thankfully Gremlin Theatre is doing just that. I fell in love with the play when I saw it on tour 20+ years ago; in contrast to my current nearly 15 years as a theater blogger, I was a math major, so I love all of the math references and discussions of proofs and higher mathematics. But it wasn't just math nerds who made this play so popular. Despite the fact that I like to call
Proof my second* favorite math play, it's about so much more than math. It's about family dynamics, caring for aging parents, relationships between very different siblings, mental illness, and what we inherit from our parents vs. making our own life separate from them. As per usual, Gremlin's production is practically perfect in every way - an excellent cast, clear direction, and spot-on design.
See it in their Vandalia Towers theater (in St. Paul's Midway neighborhood) between now and March 30, and for one of the best and most convenient dinner-and-a-show pairings in town, visit
Lake Monster Brewing in the same building, where you can now order delicious
OG Zaza pizza from across the patio (bonus: as spring weather arrives, you can enjoy your beer and pizza al fresco).
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Catherine (Maggie Cramer) and her father (Patick O'Brien)
(photo by Alyssa Kristine Photography) |
25-year-old Catherine has been caring for her father for the last five years, a brilliant mathematician suffering from mental illness that has recently made him unable to work, or even take care of himself. Cathy seems to have inherited her father's talent for math, but has put off her studies to care for him, and hasn't even her completed undergraduate degree. In his illness, Cathy's dad has filled 100 notebooks with what is mostly gibberish, but his former student Hal wants to make sure, and is determined to look through every one to see if somewhere amidst the madness, there is genius. Cathy's sister Claire, who left the family long ago to live in NYC, is in town for the weekend, and has different ideas about what Cathy should do with her life. Both sisters worry that Cathy may have also inherited her father's mental illness along with his genius. When a potentially revolutionary proof about prime numbers is found in one of the notebooks, questions arise about its authorship and what should be done about it, increasing the tension in this little group.
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| Hal (Coleson Eldredge, photo by Alyssa Kristine Photography) |
The play is well constructed in two acts, with a couple flashback scenes to fill in the details of how we got to where we are. The dialogue sounds natural, like how people really talk, and there is humor to balance out the drama (including a couple math jokes). Director Craig Johnson strikes that tone perfectly, with a nice pace and clearly delineated scenes, getting great performances from this four-person cast. Patrick O'Brien is just wonderful as Cathy's father, fully embodying both the brilliant father who wants the best for his daughter, and the ill and increasingly frail man. Coleson Eldredge, recent U of M/Guthrie BFA grad who
played a murderer last summer in Rope, is so eager and charming and awkward as Hal, and Sarah Furniss is appropriately and comically annoying as Claire, eventually showing us that there's real concern and caring underneath it all. But the star of this show, rarely leaving the stage, is Maggie Cramer as Catherine. She's been playing supporting roles around down for a few years, but really came to my attention at
American Players Theatre (a magical theater oasis in the middle of the woods of Wisconsin) last year, playing a lead role in what was maybe my favorite play of the weekend,
Dancing at Lughnasa. But I think this is her breakout role in #TCTheater. She's in almost every scene, playing intense two-person scenes with every other cast member. Cathy is a complex character, not always likeable, but always real, and Maggie plays all of those shades. She's so believable, so present, really making us empathize with Cathy.
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| Claire (Sarah Furniss, photo by Alyssa Kristine Photography) |
Gremlin's resident Technical Director Carl Schoenborn designed both the set and lighting, and as per usual it's just spot-on. The facade of one wall of a house is enough for us to imagine this once grand now run-down home in Chicago, with sparsely placed boards that allow us to see into the details of the kitchen. All of the scenes take place on the weathered porch and in the backyard, complete with a firepit with glowing embers. Lighting changes from the dark night with twinkling strings of lights, to bright daylight. The sound design (by Andrew Newman) works with the other elements to create this sense of time and place, with some well-chosen songs played during scene changes as well as before and after the show (including "Jagged Little Pill" as we're walking out, perfectly time- and theme-specific). Costumes (designed by Sarah Bauer) range from the typically casual of university life to more formal wear for a couple of scenes, and perhaps the best thing about the costumes is that they're not flashy or attention-grabbing, but feel like what these characters really wear in their normal lives. And I was impressed by the number of quick changes between scenes, or maybe it was just that the music during scene changes lulled me into thinking they were shorter than they were.
There's always been this idea that along with genius can come madness, and
Proof explores that in an engaging, entertaining, and relevant way, along with the complexities of family dynamics. Even if you're not a math nerd, you will find a lot to laugh at, think about, and relate to in this excellent production of Tony-winning play. (
Click here for info and tickets.)
