Proof: A Play | 
|  | | | Title: | Proof: A Play | | Author: | David Auburn | | Publisher: | Faber & Faber | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 05 March, 2001 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 0571199976 / 9780571199976 | | List Price: | $13.00 | | You Save: | $2.60 | | Amazon Price: | $10.40 | |
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Product Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
One of the most acclaimed plays of the 1999-2000 season, Proof is a work that explores the unknowability of love as much as it does the mysteries of science.
It focuses on Catherine, a young woman who has spent years caring for her father, Robert, a brilliant mathematician in his youth who was later unable to function without her help. His death has brought into her midst both her sister, Claire, who wants to take Catherine back to New York with her, and Hal, a former student of Catherine's father who hopes to find some hint of Robert's genius among his incoherent scribblings. The passion that Hal feels for math both moves and angers Catherine, who, in her exhaustion, is torn between missing her father and resenting the great sacrifices she made for him. For Catherine has inherited at least a part of her father's brilliance -- and perhaps some of his instability as well. As she and Hal become attracted to each other, they push at the edges of each other's knowledge, considering not only the unpredictability of genius but also the human instinct toward love and trust.
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Customer Reviews:
• Book Review On Proof 06 January, 2009
I started reading this book at a stranager's house but couldn't finish. Thank goodness Amazon had it so I now I know the purpose and ending. The stranger's copy looked so beat up that I didn't think the book existed anywhere else. It's a good play and easy to read.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1NX9GMDE2RX5O
• Brilliant, And Yet... 27 August, 2007
Proof, by David Auburn, is a compelling and tautly beautiful play, ringing with a quiet elegance. Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play, I was introduced to it through the 2005 movie, which now having read the play I realize was an extremely good adaptation, as well as a very good film in its own right. It's the story of Catherine, a brilliant but somewhat neurotic mathematics student who has lived all her life in the shadow of her famous father, a groundbreaking mathematician revered the world over. The play begins with a dialogue between Catherine and her father, in which he berates her for wasting her potential, while gradually, during the course of it, we discover that her father is insane, and has been for quite some time. He is living in semi-seclusion while Catherine looks after him. Then, as the conversation goes on, we - and Catherine - realize that her father is dead; as he calmly informs her "Heart failure. Quick. The funeral's tomorrow." From there, we are slowly sucked into a drama of at once deep intensity and lyrical lightness. Abruptly deprived of the man who, for better or worse, was the center of her existence for all her life, Catherine finds herself having to cope with life and relationships beyond her father, as Harold, a graduate student of her father's, begins going through all her father's journals to see if by some chance he wrote anything significant during his recent years of insanity. Catherine, immediately defensive and certain that her father wrote nothing but graphomaniac scribbles during the last few years, throws him out of the house. Claire is the fourth person in this coterie, Catherine's domineering, overly-careful sister, who ran out on both her father and Catherine years ago(although supporting them financially) and is now determined to drag her "troubled" little sister back with her to New York and fix her up. As half the story is told in flashbacks to scenes betweens Catherine and her father when he was still alive, these make up the four main characters.
Three of the four main characters are mathematicians, and while there is little or no actual math in the play it is still a mathematicians dream(in much the same way Possession is a poet's/writer's dream). One of the many funny moments of the play consists of Hal's band playing a song composed entirely of silence, based on the imaginary number "I", a mathematician's joke.
Proof is a tale of many things; isolation, loneliness, love, hate, the clashing of wildly different characters from different worlds(Harold, more often called Hal, belongs to a band, and Catherin's sister doesn't understand math), and the love-hate relationships engendered within families. But mostly, it is about the quest for genius to find security and definition in a world untailored for fragile people, and to set free the impulse that drives that genius. Proof has an oddly breathless feel at times; as if both Catherine and her burgeoning talent hang in the balance between existence and destruction. In an blending of poetry, prose, and math, we discover her fate, of which the following passage(one of several turning points in the play) is a perfect example -
"Let X equal the cold. It is cold in December. The months of cold equal November through February. There are four months of cold and four of heat, leaving four months of indeterminate temperature. ...Let X equal the month of full bookstores. The number of books approaches infinity as the number of months of cold approaches four. I will be as cold now as I will in the future. The future of cold is infinite. The future of cold is the future of heat..."
Still, while Proof is a remarkable and luminous work, somehow it lacks something - the immensity of vision that I would expect from a Pulitzer-Prize-winning play. It is essentially about individuals, not ideas, and while to some extent this is true of all great literature, still Proof feels small, constrained within its own eclectic world. And there is no great tragedy, love story, or revelation about human nature to make up for this, to dominate it and lift it into a book that says something, a book that will join the pantheon of great literature. It has depth but not width. It's graceful and beautiful, clever and often funny - certainly memorable - but it is not an important work.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1H11BV01L91I6
• Had To Read It For Class But Still.... 28 September, 2007
I'm a journalism major and was required to take some form of art class, so I chose Theater 101. This isn't a bad play, in fact when I first heard the synopsis, I thought my God what a terribly boring concept for a play. The dialog and character development is what changed my attitude. I know among college students this is a requirement (pending on your professor) but for all you future playwrights out there, give it a try.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2SMK5AO9YGOK6
• Great Play, But Cliched When It Comes To Depicting Mental Illness 19 December, 2007
I really liked this play. It was a good, solid play. I especially liked how they made a play about math entertaining. It's got enought math for someone who likes math to enjoy it, but it would also be very entertaining for someone who doesn't like math, because it focuses more on the relationship of the father and the daughter.
However, I was disappointed in how cliched the play depicts mental illness. I was surprised that something with such unoriginal elements won a pulitzer.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A321W4SSC0F6AP
• The Essence Of Genius In Combination With Madness 24 January, 2008
This play captures the essence of mathematicians and some of the ways they do mathematics. Catherine is the daughter of her mathematician father Robert, who was brilliant and revolutionary in his early twenties, but has descended into madness. For the last few years Catherine has suppressed her desire to study mathematics at Northwestern University in order to care for her father. Robert has just died and Hal, one of his Ph. D. students, comes to the house to examine the notebooks Robert had filled in his last years.
At first, there is nothing of significance, but when Catherine gives Hal the key to a locked desk drawer, he finds a notebook containing some astounding mathematics. Catherine is circumspect about who wrote the proof, saying that it was her father, but hinting that she might have helped develop the proof. Hal is astonished at the discovery, asking if he can take it to his colleagues, as it is so complex that he doesn't feel qualified to evaluate it. The relationship between Hal and Catherine is complicated by their sleeping together shortly after Robert's funeral.
Catherine's sister Claire has arrived from New York and wants to take Catherine back with her so that she can be treated for her mental instability. Eventually, Catherine admits that she was the one who developed the proof, working on it after her father went to bed.
It is well known in the mathematics community that nearly all of the major advances in mathematics are done by people in their early twenties. Very few mathematicians have demonstrated greatness over the age of thirty. That is a fundamental theme of this book and is even mentioned by Robert in his moments for greater lucidity. There is also the appearance of the mathematical genius in the largely untrained Catherine, something that has also occurred several times in history.
In the end, Catherine is clearly moving along the same path as her father, although her mental instability appeared at an earlier age, probably induced by her regular exposure to her father. This thread is something that all people deal with, "How much of the traits of my parents will I demonstrate as I age?" In combination with the potential for greatness, all of these plotlines combine to create an engaging and interesting play. My pleasure was further enhanced by the fact that I am a college instructor in mathematics.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1S3C5OFU508P3
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