Prime Time for Barnard Theater

A play about angsty mathematicians from the University of Chicago? In the wrong hands, this source material would produce a show about as interesting as that Calc. III problem set you've been avoiding.

Luckily, when tackled by playwright David Auburn, the result is Proof, the recipient of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for drama-a smash hit both on and off Broadway, and the Barnard Department of Theatre's latest production. The play, which was also made into an underrated 2005 film starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Jake Gyllenhaal, is "deceptively simple" to perform, says director Rebecca Guy, a professor of theater at Barnard.

"It's an incredible acting experience because there's nothing between the actors and the experiences of their characters," she said. This makes sense, especially considering the other productions that have gone up at Barnard this year. Unlike previous offerings, like August Strindberg's A Dream Play, there's nothing whimsical or fantastical about Proof-it concerns regular people in the present day, which may present one of the greatest acting challenges its student performers have ever faced.

The play revolves around Catherine (Natasha Warner, BC '07), the 25-year-old daughter of Robert (Henry Mortensen, CC '10), a once-brilliant mathematician whose genius has rapidly deteriorated into mental instability-a trait that his daughter may or may not share. When the play opens, Robert has just died after a long battle with mental illness, and Catherine, who had dropped out of school to care for him, is left alone in her father's house.

Hal (Patrick Barrett, CC '09), Robert's former student, is going through the massive quantities of notebooks that Robert, a graphomaniac who "wrote compulsively," left behind. Catherine's sister Claire (Gavi Goldstein, BC '07), a pulled-together currency analyst from New York City who is the polar opposite of disheveled Catherine, has come to Chicago in order to attend the funeral and try to convince her stubborn sister to come live with her.

The dynamics of Proof change when a mathematical proof is found in a locked drawer in Robert's study, one that proves a "theorem about prime numbers, something they've been trying to prove ever since there were mathematicians." From then on, there is a mystery to be solved-who wrote the proof, Robert or Catherine?

Considering that Proof takes place entirely within the confines of the porch on the back of Catherine's house, and the fact that it has a tiny, four-person cast, it may seem that the production is relatively small-scale.

However, despite the minimal setting, Auburn's script deals with a lot of big ideas-themes like authorship, the connection between intelligence and madness, and gender politics. This last topic is one that Guy feels is particularly important-"What Catherine is going through [being a female mathematician in a largely male-dominated field] is different from what men go through, even in the arts. A friend of mine who's a composer has told me that the percentage of women composers now is no different than it was in 1929."

In order to assure that Proof is mathematically on track, Guy has enlisted the help of Dave Bayer, a math professor at Barnard. Bayer certainly has experience in this area. In 2000, when Proof was off Broadway, "I wrote a review of the play for a math journal," Bayer said. "Ron Howard, who was starting production on A Beautiful Mind, read my review and actually asked me to serve as a math consultant on the movie." Bayer, along with the cast, will be leading a discussion following the play "in case the audience has any questions."

Don't worry too much about the arithmetic, though-Proof's broad themes help to make it accessible even to those who haven't had a math class since their senior year of high school. Although vaguely worded numerical concepts like "elliptic curves" and "modular forms" are mentioned during the show, the math-speak never gets too technical.

An irresistible mix of theatrics and theorems, Proof should serve as the solution to that most pressing of problems: "What should I do this weekend?"