Ayo Edibiri and Don Cheadle are two of our finest screen performers, radiating an intelligence and likability that should serve them well in the first Broadway revival of David Auburn’s Pulitzer-winning 2000 drama Proof. They play a father and daughter bound together by a love of advanced mathematics, a connection that’s further honed when Edibiri’s Catherine postpones college to care for Cheadle’s professor father during his troubled final years. And yet director Thomas Kail’s production feels more dutiful than deep, an oddly bloodless exercise in melodrama that keeps its passions bundled up as if girding for a frigid Chicago winter.
The play opens on the eve of the funeral of Cheadle’s Robert, a renowned mathematician at the University of Chicago who revolutionized three different branches of the field in his early 20s and then sank into serious bouts of mental illness that left him scribbling gibberish in the notebooks he always kept handy. Catherine finds herself at a loss managing her grief, the attention of a pushy doctoral student (Jin Ha, projecting an appealingly self-aware nerdiness) intent on combing through those notebooks for any hint of viable intellectual work product, and the smothering of her older sister, Claire (Kara Young), a newly engaged finance exec who’s been paying the mortgage on the family home but is now intent on selling the place and resettling her sister in New York City with her.
While Young teeters close to the sitcom level with an amped-up performance as the citified outsider and bullying big sister, Cheadle and Edibiri maintain an unnaturally even keel throughout, suggesting neither the flashes of genius nor the extremes of mental illness we keep hearing about. Cheadle comes closest to the mark in a flashback where a still-lucid Robert excitedly talks about his new work — pages of nonsense that Catherine reluctantly reads aloud as Cheadle’s whole bearing deflates before our eyes. Too often, though, seem to be plodding through the story with the head-down dedication of mathematicians testing a particularly difficult proof — like the one whose authorship becomes a pivotal mystery that drives much of the second act.
What’s missing is a sense that either has actually battled psychiatric issues, even second hand. Catherine repeatedly articulates her worry that she will lose her faculties like her dad — “Crazy people don’t sit around wondering if they’re nuts,” he assures her in an imagined conversation. And the script drops clues that Catherine may indeed experience troubles ahead: the paranoia that prompts her to call the police when she discovers Hal hiding one of her dad’s notebooks, or her impulsive but passionless sexual advance on him soon after at the funeral after-party. (Mary Louise Parker, who originated the role in 2000, radiated a sexiness that was as much about her character’s inhibition control as it was about any genuine desire.) But Edibiri seems to coast through these scenes as if on autopilot — or as if she’s already on a strict regimen of sedatives that keep her brain in a safe but foggy state of compliance.
Edibiri is on more solid ground when she’s leaning into her outsider status, within her family or the academic world. At one point, she notes the history of female mathematicians being underestimated or dismissed and suggesting that she might have the skills to join those ranks. The fact that Robert and his daughters are Black is never addressed, even elliptically, though you can intuit how race might have been another obstacle for even brilliant academics to overcome in late-20th-century America. (Even the show’s physical look lacks a cultural specificity, from Dede Ayite’s suburban preppie costumes to the generic clapboard family home, designed by Teresa L. Williams, that includes shear scrim shingles to artfully suggest a setting that isn’t always there.)
Auburn’s drama remains a sturdily constructed mystery that deepens as it progresses. Kail has assembled a talented cast and perhaps they will find their way into the material over time. But at present, they seem to be scratching at the surface of characters who are locked in primal but individual battles over legacy and trust. How do you leave a mark in the world, and how do you know if your intellectual inheritance might also lead to your undoing? Proof offers no easy answers, but still raises questions worth contemplating. ★★★☆☆
PROOF
Booth Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through July 19 for $99 to $421