STAGE REVIEW
'Proof' tells tale of ailing genius, troubled daughter
By Joseph Rozmiarek
Advertiser Drama Critic
David Auburn's "Proof" plays like a tantalizing mathematical formula. It offers hints and glimpses, but the evidence is contradictory, lumpy and inelegant. And a neat solution continues to elude us.
Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser
Like a good drama, it's challenging, causing us to think, but also throws in a bit of fun along with some insight. The play won a clutch of awards in 2001, including the Pulitzer Prize.
Craig Howes plays genius mathematician Robert, and Laura Bach is Catherine, his daughter, nurse and primary companion in "Proof."
It enjoys an excellent production in its revival at Manoa Valley Theatre, where Linda Johnson both directs and plays a supporting role.
The story swirls around a genius mathematician who revolutionized his profession twice while still in his 20s. We meet him in middle age, past his prime, but still an integral faculty member at the University of Chicago. It is a warm personal moment, in which he presents a bottle of champagne to his daughter on her 25th birthday.
But amid the father and daughter banter, we sense that something is not quite right. Then it is revealed that he is recently dead, victim of a debilitating mental disorder that rendered his last years a helpless muddle.
His daughter was his only nurse and major companion. And she may be sharing in his same genetic sickness.
• 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays-Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, 4 p.m. Sundays through June 1 • Manoa Valley Theatre • $25 • 988-6131
As the play reveals the last days of the father, some of which included productive work during periods of remission, the focus shifts to ask disturbing questions of the daughter. Is she losing her sanity? Did her father author the one lucid notebook filled with mathematical discoveries, or did she? And where is the proof?
'Proof'
The plot is not overly complicated, but it does keep us calculating the possibilities. It also offers good acting opportunities.
Laura Bach plays the daughter with an effective mix of stubbornness and vulnerability, steel resolve and resigned exhaustion. During the course of her father's nightlong funeral party and the morning after, she takes a roller-coaster ride of emotional highs and lows, all played out on the deteriorating back porch of the family home.
Brent Yoshikami does excellent work as a young graduate student, infatuated by both the father and the daughter. Yoshikami's acting style could be written off as overly mannered, if it weren't for the fact that he perfectly skewers the character and keeps him fascinating all evening long.
You may remember Yoshikami as the nervous intern from Manoa Valley Theatre's production of "Wit" or as the disturbed young boy in Diamond Head Theatre's production of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." In this role he's furtive, jerky, hesitant, impulsive, and thoroughly riveting in his repeated attempts to solve the father's notebooks and the daughter's psyche.
Director Johnson also takes on the unforgiving role of the realist elder daughter. Absent during her father's illness, she arrives after his death to set things right, but threatens to damage the delicate balance surrounding her weakened younger sister.
Craig Howes does fine work as the father, warm and genuine in his healthy moments, desperate and confused as his illness reclaims him.
Kelly Berry designed the dilapidated back porch set, and sound designer Andrew Meader perfectly captures the result of a 2 a.m. attack on a piece by Vivaldi by an amateur rock band of drunken mathematicians.
"Proof" plays well at Manoa Valley Theatre, where it both stimulates and entertains.
