dailyloe.com – The first Broadway revival of David Auburn’s Pulitzer-winning play Proof opened at the Booth Theatre in New York. The production stars Ayo Edebiri, an Emmy winner for The Bear, and Don Cheadle. Director Thomas Kail helms this new take on the family drama.
Edebiri plays Catherine, a newly 25-year-old woman shuffling around her late father’s Chicago home. She is stubborn and sardonic, content to be stuck idle in the mud. Cheadle plays Robert, her late father and a great mind of mathematics severely waylaid by mental cataclysm in his later days.
Catherine worries she has inherited all of her father’s illness but perhaps only a little of his brilliance. She put aside aspirations to follow in his career footsteps to become his caretaker. With that purpose gone, she spends her time speaking to his ghost and wondering if she is going crazy herself.
At first, Edebiri seems to have found her own successful take on the character. In the play’s opening scenes, she plays Catherine as a young adult arrested in petulant late-adolescence. This may be a defensive posture against the forces of reality bearing down upon her.
She is quippy and needy with her imaginary-friend dad. She is amusingly aloof to his devoted former student Hal, played by Jin Ha. Hal is sipping tea and trying to connect with her.
The play was once described as a perfect play in the formal sense. It is a template from which any budding playwright could draw inspiration. Auburn carefully calibrates the funny with the sad and balances credible realism with fugues of understated poetry.
There is even a grabby cliffhanger at the end of act one. The sturdiness of Auburn’s construction can stand up to a lot. This production seriously tries its integrity, according to the review.
That the house is still standing at the end is a mighty testament to Auburn’s ingenious design. Kara Young, a two-time Tony winner, delivers a standout performance that does some heavy lifting. Her work soars in this production.
