WOMEN scientists seem to be occupying playwrights’ minds these days.There was Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia,” which featured a 19th-century female math expert.
There was also Shelagh Stephenson’s “Experiment With an Airpump,” which saw a current English woman scientist as heir to the tangled world of the late 18th century.
Now “Proof,” a new play by David Auburn – directed by Daniel Sullivan – gives the topic a contemporary setting on the back porch of a Chicago home.
Larry Bryggman plays Robert, an elderly, senile math genius who does elaborate proofs of gibberish.
His daughter, played by Mary-Louise Parker, is the central character of the play. A math major, she gives up college to be with her father in his final years.
Parker is sharp, attractive, guardedly needy – all the things a daughter like Catherine would be. Her performance is a triumph.
Hal, a bright graduate student, falls for Catherine and begins to go through her father’s gibberish-filled notebooks systematically in search of genius.
Hal is Ben Shenkman, an actor who brings every gift to his depiction of a young, eager, serious but horny math student.
Following her dad’s funeral, Catherine makes love to Hal, then gives him a notebook containing a new, exciting proof.
Hal checks out the math with some colleagues, then proclaims the work amazing. Catherine reveals herself to be the proof’s true author.
We then meet her sister Claire, who lives in New York and makes a bundle as an analyst and returns home to sell the old house.
She’s Johanna Day, perfect as a modern, chic, rich, sensible woman who wants to get her sister away from the depressing Chicago atmosphere that has, in her view, immobilized Catherine in a frightened, caregiving role.
Just as Catherine is about to abandon her old self and adopt a new life in New York, Hal returns with the notebook, convinced that she’s the author.
He begs her to explain the proof, which would mean staying in Chicago.
There are two different faces of her future before her.
This is the real subject of the play – it doesn’t shine any light on math, but has much to say about a young woman’s torturous road to light.
She has dwelt in a back-porch annex to her father’s madness and out of it has fashioned – in her own courageous way – something exciting and original.
“Proof” is not a great play, but it is a clever, beautifully acted coming-of-age drama that manages to sing to us today.
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PROOF
Manhattan Theatre Club, 131 W. 55th St., between Sixth and Seventh avenues, (212) 581-1212.