Proof
David Auburn's Proof is one of the strongest plays that the American theatre has produced in the past twenty-five years. It has proved to be an engaging drama with a wide popularity. Although its protagonist, Catherine, is a mathematician, and much of the drama concerns a proof that may or may not have been worked out by her mathematician father, the play's appeal lies in a gifted person's struggle to be taken seriously. Neither the graduate student who may or may not want to steal the proof in question nor her bland and conventional sister seem capable of regarding Catherine as anything but a wreck. Which is of course what Catherine looks like. What she has to teach them is that their attitude toward her is what's keeping her down.
Although Gwyneth Paltrow is surprisingly good in John Madden's film adaptation, and Jennifer Jason Leigh was super, too, in the role on Broadway, Catherine will always be Mary-Louise Parker to me. Ms Parker fully projected the drift, something between distraction and disorientation, of someone attending to far more important matters of the mind. She also demonstrated the natural scariness of a pretty woman who doesn't "take care of herself" - who doesn't seem to care about appearances at all.
The text of the play is available from Faber and Faber, and it makes a very good read.
Comments
The things you learn here. I was so hoping JJL was related to Vivien somehow but alas, no. However, the search did turn up a very praiseworthy note in her middle name. Proof will accompany me on the road as soon as it arrives from the bookseller. Reading playscripts is an odd taste not shared by many I've known.
Posted by: George | August 18, 2006 07:04 AM
Of course, when I saw MLP in Proof on Broadway, I was seared to my seat by the experience, having sacrificed my life and career to an ill parent to whom I was dedicated, and having my otherwise legitimate identification as a "smart and successful person" put on hold. I felt very much like MLP's character, as you describe her; but others looked at me (or so I imagined! maybe it was I who was looking at my life) like I should be my former self, what was I doing? I was grateful to her for portraying a choice, incoherent though it may have been, and a complicated, underappreciated, and misunderstood person in life, whatever that might be.
Posted by: Susan | August 18, 2006 07:24 AM
Oh my, Mary-Louise Parker. In the flesh. One of my all time absolute top celebrity crushes.
Sigh.
As My Friend From Kansas said to me the other day, "Tom, we have to go and live in New York."
I may try to make it over again in November (I've been eying up the Metropolitan's "Visit NYC" three-productions-in-three-nights season tickets). If there was one show currently running that I absolutely must see, what would you recommend ? (Only constraint - I'm only extraordinarily rarely taken by musicals).
Posted by: Waterhot | August 18, 2006 01:22 PM
I have to disagree about the play. Yes, it's good, and it's engaging. And its a good workout/playground for the two lead actors, who play the girl and her father. (I saw it with Mary Louise Parker and then again with Jennifer Jason Leigh. thats what cheap TKTS will do to you.) I feel, however, that it's still unfulfilled, in that the whole issue of the mathematics and what the proof is proving isnt really touched, and these characters really ought to have spoken more about the actual proof. which is what drives the characters, with the exception of the sister. So, there's a central metaphor whis is just a prop. And the mathematics stories that are thrown into the script are all things that could be looked up in one afternoon at the library. a lot of it i was familiar with from high school.
By way of comparison, Tom Stoppard's Hapgood and Arcadia actually seriously go into discussing the science and theory that are the metaphors the plays are built on. And Copenhagen does that in a brilliant way. The films Basquiat and Pollock are about art, and how passionate people are about it, and they don't hesitate to really approach the art and talk about it. These playwrights/screenwriters really OWN their metaphors. I think David Auburn didn't. He came up with something clever, but he never really built his play on it.
and the characters in Proof are all a little cardboardy, you know... And yes, Ive read the play in addition to seeing the production and the movie. I just think it was a good solid B, when there have been so many A and A-plus plays over the last 25 or so years.
Recent plays that are more important, stronger works of art, and likely to last and be revived: Burn This or Book Of Days, by Lanford Wilson; Take Me Out or Three Days of Rain by Richard Greenberg; Love Valor Compassion or Master Class by Terrence McNally; Wit by Margaret Edson; Gross Indecency; Fences, Seven Guitars, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom by August Wilson (and the whole batch of them); The Sisters Rosenzweig by Wendy Wasserstein; M Butterfly; The Cryptogram or Oleanna by David Mamet; Angels in America or Homebody/Kabul by Tony Kushner; Side Man by Warren Leight...
I know, I'm ranting. but I don't think we'll be seeing revivals of Proof in 20 years.
What are other plays you liked? I would think we have a lot of common ground, based on how much i like the blague.
Posted by: Sam | August 18, 2006 01:56 PM
Angels in America, Yes! Too bad email addresses don't show here anymore, perhaps Sam will snap to my blog and email me there. I really would like to hear more about the use of incompletely developed metaphors and character development. 'You mean I just can't say the character was a mathematician and let the audience run with it from there?', interesting, I wonder how that works with characters who are truck drivers?
Posted by: George | August 19, 2006 07:06 AM