When I first saw David Auburn’ s play, Proof at the Manhattan Theatre Club in the spring of 2000, I knew nothing about it other than I had heard it was a play about mathematicians. By the time the curtain came down I realized how illinformed
I was. Proof is in the great tradition of modern American drama in its depiction of familial love and the sacrifices that it demands of you. The father, Robert, writes in one of his notebooks about his twenty-five year old daughter, Catherine, “The years she has lost caring for me. I almost wrote wasted.” Roben was a mathematician at the University of Chicago and an acknowledged genius who having achieved his extraordinary success in his early twenties descended into the abyss of madness. Hal, a prize student of Robert’s, extols his mentor to Catherine, “He revolutionized
the field twice before he was twenty-two.” And mathematics is a field where, as Hal also observes, “There’s this fear that your creativity peaks around twenty-three and it’s all downhill from there.” Bur Catherine’s fear is not that she has inherited her father’s genius bur its darker side as weil:

Catherine: How old were you? When it started.

Robert: Mid-twenties. Twenty-three, flur. 1s that what you ‘re worried about?

Catherine: l’ve thought about it.

Catherine’s older sister, Claire, who claims that by “working fourteen-hour days” to have “paid off the mortgage on this three-bedroom house while I was living in a studio in Brooklyn” echoes the fear:

Claire: You had so much talent …

Catherine: You think Tm like Dad.

Claire: 1 think you have some of his talent and some of his tendency toward … instability.

In her biography of the mathematical genius, John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar quotes the mathematician Paul Halmos, “Geniuses are of two kinds: the ones who are just like all of us, but very much more so, and the ones who, apparently, have an extra human spark.” In Proof, David Auburn paints a compelling portrait of that “extra human spark” and the exacting price it demands.

Terence Lamude