The first Broadway revival in the play’s history of David Auburn’s Pulitzer-winning Proof arrives with the usual machinery of prestige theater, and The Guardian’s review says the production seriously tried the play’s integrity. The house was still standing at the end, the review noted, calling that a testament to Auburn’s ingenious and ingeniously simple design. In other words, the script survives the apparatus around it.
Who Carries the Weight
The production is Thomas Kail’s new Broadway staging, and it was described as a star vehicle for Ayo Edebiri, an Emmy winner for The Bear, and Don Cheadle, a movie star who has done compelling work in features great, small and everywhere in between. Edebiri played Catherine, newly 25 and shuffling around the back yard of her father’s Chicago home, while Cheadle played her late father, Robert, a great mind of mathematics who was severely waylaid by mental cataclysm in his latter days. Catherine worries that she has inherited all of her father’s illness, but perhaps only a little of his brilliance. Aspirations to follow in his career footsteps were put aside to become his caretaker, and with that purpose gone, she spends her time speaking to his ghost and wondering if she is going crazy herself.
The review said Edebiri initially found a successful take on Catherine, playing her as a young adult arrested in petulant late-adolescence, quippy and needy with her imaginary-friend dad, and amusingly aloof to her devoted former student Hal, played by Jin Ha, who is sifting through Robert’s journals in the hopes of finding some undiscovered remnant of his genius. Catherine treats her sister, type-A Manhattanite Claire, played by Kara Young, as a nagging mom figure, indignant to Claire’s attempts at coaxing Catherine toward a new and more productive life.
What Breaks Down on Stage
The review said Edebiri shrewdly approximated the slouch and gesture of a frustrated, awkward teen, or an adult frozen in that mode, but that when the more dramatic, plot-advancing mechanics of the play began, she quickly lost her grasp on the performance and devolved into a jumble of stammers and tics that increasingly isolated the audience from Catherine’s humanity. It said she became the living embodiment of Catherine’s most hyperbolic fears about her mental health, a cliche of addled behavior that stood in harsh contrast to the relative plainness and naturalism of Auburn’s writing.
Cheadle, the review said, went the opposite direction and barely betrayed even a hint of Robert’s mental disturbance, remaining curiously flat in the role. The review said the pair never fused together into the picture of generational legacy, both accepted and rebuked, that the play intended. That gap between the play’s design and the performance choices is where the production’s strain shows most clearly: the text is trying to hold a family, a history, and a set of inherited burdens together, while the actors and staging do not always land in the same place.
Who Keeps It Afloat
Kara Young was praised as a late-in-rehearsals replacement who brought much-needed clarity to the fraught domestic scene. Young, a two-time Tony winner in back-to-back years, was described as crisp and legible as the frustrated, guilty Claire, who has subsidized the lives of her father and sister but regrets her absence from the house in the most difficult years. The review called it a dialed-in, no-frills performance, saying she kept the thing afloat, as perhaps Claire did for her ailing family.
Jin Ha was also said to have effective moments as the sweet but calculating Hal, who must reconcile his attraction to Claire with his desire to exploit something of her father’s, and of Claire’s. Despite that strong support, the review said it ultimately fell on Edebiri to hold the play’s center of gravity, and that she wobbled badly under that weight. The hierarchy of the production is plain enough: one performer is asked to anchor the whole structure, while others orbit the damage.
On the style front, the review said Kail mostly got out of the way of the text, though he added a few embellishments, for better and worse. It said Kris Bowers’ original music was appropriately wistful and weary, poignantly scoring simple scene transitions, but that strip lights glowing along the edges of Teresa L Williams’ otherwise sharply designed set during those transitions called to mind too many slick, fluorescent-lit productions that had made their way to New York from LED-happy London in recent years, and that such cold flashiness was not needed.
The review concluded that a few technical missteps were minor compared with the serious performance troubles at the heart of Kail’s Proof, and that the unassuming strength of Auburn’s writing still managed to shine through the actorly miscalculation. It said the audience still craved answers to the play’s mild mysteries and still chuckled ruefully at its subtly recurring motifs, and that the production’s handwriting may have been awfully messy, but the basic math of it all was sound as ever.