In David Auburn’s Tony Award® and Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Proof, Catherine – who has been taking care of her mathematician father, Robert, during his mental decline – is left with many questions, but few answers. She, too, is a mathematician, and is wondering where the similarities with her father will take her. Proof is being presented by the Department of Theatre and Music Studies at SUNY Brockport, opening on Friday, February 23, at 7:30 p.m. in the Tower Fine Arts Center, 180 Holley Street. Tickets are $17/general, $12/senior citizens, Brockport alumni, faculty, and staff, and $9/students. They are available at http://www.fineartstix.brockport.edu, at the Tower Box Office, or by phone at 585-395-2787.
While visiting Catherine, Hal, a former student of Robert’s, comes across a notebook filled with extremely complex and ground-breaking computations. He assumes it is his former professor’s work, but Catherine indicates that they are her own calculations. Trying to prove to Hal and her sister, Claire, that it is her work begins to consume Catherine, who is teetering on the brink of mental illness herself.
Auburn says he wrote it as “an attempt to merge his abiding interest in popular science and math into a modern-day romance and an exploration of how mental disease affects family dynamics.” Frank Kuhn, who is directing the four-person cast (including Jeffrey Thompson, an assistant director in the University’s Information Technology department, as the father), said that “working with this terrific cast has been a delight. They are all so focused on the material and the relationships in the piece.”
Proof will be performed on February 23, 24, 29, March 1, and 2, at 7:30 p.m. There is also an ASL-interpreted matinee performance on Sunday, February 25, at 2 p.m.
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