She dropped out of her own math studies at Northwestern to stay home and take care of her father in his last years while he filled up notebooks with gibberish and sought to interpret the communications of aliens through the Dewey Decimal numbers on library books. Still, there was always the hope that he might regain his creative gifts, and in the days after his death, one of his proteges comes across a complex proof among his papers that could change the course of mathematical thinking. The proof sets off a puzzle that keeps audience members on the edge of their seats. The Broadway production benefits from a luminous performance by Mary-Louise Parker as Catherine, who fears she may have inherited not only her father's intellectual talent but also his mental instability. At the same time as Catherine wrestles with her inner demons, as well as with her sister, a financial analyst who wants to sell the family home, she also is falling in love with the young mathematician who discovered the proof.
Proof sounds grim, but it's actually funny.
Though Auburn studied calculus at the University of Chicago, his play deftly suggests knowledge of its arcane subject without needing to explain anything more complicated than a wisecrack about prime numbers. Witty lines come in the regular intervals of a sitcom, and everything gets wrapped up in two hours exactly. Proof is a remarkably efficient affair, moving the plot along almost exclusively through fast-paced dialogue. In fact, about the only speech that lasts as much as a minute is a reverie by Catherine's father, in a flashback, about the pleasure of killing a September afternoon browsing in a bookstore. Wilson's six characters, all of whom have their say at great length, talk like real people, going off on loopy tangents and sometimes not making much sense.