November 1 - 19, 2006
Proof
Reviewed by Brad Hathaway

Running time 2:05 - one intermission
Click here to read our review of the movie
t A Potomac Stages Pick for intellectually stimulating
 and emotionally satisfying fare

Proof is known for its success at making intellectually gifted people seem entirely human while it gets the exhilaration of the pursuit of knowledge just right. Geniuses are people too, with hopes, fears, loves and losses. This warm, fascinating and funny play draws you into the personal world of intelligent people who are facing major crises in their personal lives. Director Ali Miller and her cast of four approach the material the only way that makes sense: trust it. They resist any temptation to embellish or draw attention to themselves. Instead, they keep the focus on the play as written. Not a bad approach when that play is a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Storyline: The twenty-five year old daughter of a famous mathematician has spent five years caring for her father as mental illness progressively incapacitated him. On the eve of his funeral she has to cope not only with his death, but with the concern of her sister, the attention of one of her father’s graduate students and the lingering presence of her father in their Chicago home. She may have inherited some of her father’s genius, but she fears she may have also inherited his "tendency to instability."

As good as this cast is, and these four form a well balanced ensemble, they are working with a script that is uncommonly successful at creating four well-defined people, each with dreams, fears, histories and opinions, whose dealings with each other are the natural results of their personalities and circumstances. It is all there in the text. With a mathematical "proof" at the center of the story, Auburn turns his title into a double entandré. He also comes up with one of the great first-act curtain lines of recent memory. There is little actual discussion of higher mathematics, so the audience need not even know what a prime number might be in order to follow the discussions. There is an absence of "talking down" to the audience or artificially keeping the discussion non-technical. A welcome improvement to the original text is the elimination of the one awkward effort to avoid technical details, a fairly clumsy "lets go for a walk and you can tell me what this means" moment which proves to be superfluous. The play is the better for its absence.

Interconnecting relationships come into focus at different times during the play. First it is the relationship between father and daughter and it is a warm and touching mixture of affection and mutual admiration. Don Kefelick finds the right amount of frustration as the father whose capacities have failed him, and Katy Carkuff mixes multiple emotions as the daughter who is not only dealing with grief over her father's fate but with a deep seated fear that she may share that fate. Much of the play sits on Carkuff's character's shoulders and she handles it with a sense of assurance and aplomb. Soon the focus shifts to the relationship between the daughter and a young man who had been her father's student at the University of Chicago. He's played with charm and intelligence by Daniel Eichner. The most difficult part in the play, the one that is the least sympathetic and likeable, is the father's other daughter, the one who has helped him financially but at arms length in his final illness-filled years. K. Clare Johnson tackles this most difficult/least rewarding role in a businesslike manner that, while not adding a great deal to the mix, avoids the very real potential to damage the tender heart of the story of the other three.

Firebelly, a small professional company with a mission to give younger performers a chance to sink their teeth into meaty parts appropriate to their age, lives up to that mission here. They produce their shows in the spare black box owned and operated by the County of Arlington, Theatre On The Run. Production values aren't the point of their shows and here the set is sparse but thoroughly serviceable. The one-location play takes place on the back porch of a house, so a stick fence, a few sprigs of ivy, some patio furniture and a flagstone pattern of linoleum suffices. Time and season are nicely invoked by Andrew Griffin's lighting design which goes from the semi-darkness of late night moonlight  to the memory of the warmth of a late September afternoon. The entire design is simple enough and approached with sufficient subtlety to avoid drawing attention to itself, which just like the acting, serves to keep the focus on Auburn's lovely play.

Written by David Auburn. Directed by Ali Miller. Design: Ali Miller (set) Lynly Saunders (costumes) Andrew Griffin (lights) Sam Walker (sound)  Ray Gniewek (photography) Kathi Gollwitzer (stage manager). Cast: Katy Carkuff, Daniel Eichner, K. Clare Johnson, Don Kenefick.