David Auburn’s Proof—which won pretty much every award after its 2000 premiere—is the rare play that tackles complex issues accessibly but intelligently. Very funny and profoundly moving in its examination of the fraught intersection between genius and mental imbalance, Proof centers on Catherine, who dropped out of college to care for her beloved father, the mathematical wizard and esteemed professor Robert. Auburn shrewdly opens his play with a witty but thoughtful scene between daughter and father, where we discover the layers of their knotty relationship as well as the fact that he has recently died. 

 

Catherine navigates complicated feelings about her father as Hal, a young professor whom Robert mentored, is in the house going through the voluminous papers Robert left behind; and Claire, her pragmatic older sister who wants to take Catherine back to New York to start a new life away from Chicago, has arrived for the funeral. Although Catherine has inherited her father’s math genius, when Hal discovers a brilliantly argued proof among the papers, he assumes it’s Robert’s and hesitates to believe Catherine when she says it’s hers. For her part, Claire tends to share Hal’s skepticism. 

 

When Proof premiered a quarter-century ago, Mary Louise Parker played Catherine with her usual effortless mastery, by turns depressed and buoyant, ironical and sentimental. Surprisingly—or maybe unsurprisingly, considering it’s Hollywood—in the 2005 screen adaptation, Parker was bypassed for Gwyneth Paltrow, whose paltry portrayal irrevocably damaged the film. 

 

In Thomas Kail’s absorbing new production, Ayo Edebiri plays Catherine quite differently than Parker and Paltrow but is happily closer to the former. Edebiri is less obviously assertive than Parker was, but her bemused, Zen-like calm is another valid way to show Catherine dealing with both her father’s legacy and the possibility that she may have inherited both his genius and his madness. Don Cheadle is a charmingly low-key Robert, Kara Young reins in her innate dazzlingness to make Claire a practical but smothering sister, and Jin Ha’s Hal amusingly fumbles about while revering Robert’s legacy and falling in love with Catherine. 

 

Kail’s sturdy direction is fortified by Amanda Zieve’s canny lighting, Justin Ellington and Connor Wang’s clever sound design and Theresa L. Williams’ colorful set design. But centering it all is David Auburn’s foolproof script, which is mathematical in design but humane in execution.