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There are times when what looks like a perfectly constructed equation just doesn't add up. Great play, great cast, great director, but less than great result. Generally that means that one of the variables has let the others down. And unfortunately, that is the case for the current Broadway revival of David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize winning play Proof. Not to mix mathematical metaphors, but the answers are there in the text and performances. What's missing is the directorial rigor to show us the work that should take the play where it needs to go. Welcome to Broadway Radio. My name is Matt Tamnini and today I am reviewing the first Broadway revival of Proof. The show takes place on the back porch of a Chicago home in the days following the death of Robert, played by Don Cheadle, a once brilliant mathematician whose later years were consumed by mental illness. His daughter, Catherine, played by IO Edebiri, who gave up her own education in early adulthood to care for him, is left to sort through not only his hundreds of nearly unintelligible notebooks, but also the terrifying possibility that she may have inherited both his genius and his instability. When a potentially groundbreaking mathematical proof is found amongst Robert's things, the play becomes not only a family drama about grief and caretaking, but a deeper examination of authorship, trust, gender, inheritance, and the horrifying uncertainty of not knowing whether the thing that makes you extraordinary might also be the thing that eventually destroys you. Despite the play's complicated questions, what we get in this revival instead is a well acted, completely respectable production of a play that feels like it has lost all of its bite. But that is far from the fault of the cast. A deberry and Cheadle, both in their Broadway acting debuts, are very good, and there are moments when a debris approaches transcendence. Together they bring a rawness to a bruised but tender relationship, one battered by mental instability but still somehow intact. You can see the years of dependency and exhaustion, the strange intimacy between a daughter who has become A caretaker and a father who still, in flashes, wants to be the person who teaches her how to see the world. Cheadle is warm, intelligent and kind in a solid Broadway debut. He does not play Robert as a grand, operatic mad genius, and that restraint mostly works, but it is slightly indicative of a larger issue with the show. Deborah, meanwhile, naturally carries so much charisma that it is impossible not to be warmed just by her presence on stage. She is funny without pushing for laughs, emotionally accessible without seeming performative, and so naturally charming that the audience wants to be on Catherine's side almost from the moment she walks on stage. And that, unfortunately, is a bigger part of the aforementioned problem. Proof needs us to love Catherine, but it also needs us to doubt her. We need to feel and see the instability inside her. We need to wonder whether her anger is justified or coming from a place of pure paranoia, whether her brilliance is real or appropriated, whether her version of events is the truth or a desperate attempt to hold onto the only part of her father's legacy that might still belong to her, especially in the second act. We should not merely be waiting for the play to confirm what Catherine is telling us. We should be trapped in the awful space between believing what this character we have grown to care for is telling us and the suspicion that our eyes have created. Unfortunately, this version of the show gives us very little reason to doubt Catherine, and the responsibility for that feels like it rests on the shoulders of the director rather than the performers. Deboree's Catherine is too fundamentally legible, too easy to believe. That is not because Adebiri lacks the ability to complicate her. I think she is more than capable of finding the darker, thorough, thornier, more unstable impulses in the part. But the production around her never seems particularly interested in pushing her there. Her Catherine is wounded, sarcastic, defensive and grieving, but rarely unsettling, and even more rarely even approaching unhinged. Catherine's emotional volatility and anxiety feel more like those of a woman grieving her father, mourning the potentially best years of her academic life, having been squandered and fighting to be believed by both a male dominated university system and and a more pragmatic sister. That is all compelling, but it is not quite the same thing as seeming frighteningly unstable herself, which is what the play ultimately requires. Without that question of Catherine's mental status, the current Broadway revival of Proof, directed by Thomas Kail, becomes a solid modern play about a difficult family and a disputed academic discovery. Which is fine. Auburn's writing is strong enough that even a cautious Production still works, but when the questions around sanity, heredity, manipulation and authorship are allowed to fully combust, proof cracks open into something much more powerful and unsettling. It becomes less a tidy prestige drama and more like an American ghost play, closer in spirit to Tennessee Williams and Eugene o' Neill than this revival seems willing to explore. Robert is dead, but he is everywhere. His genius haunts the house, and his illness haunts his daughter. Catherine is not simply trying to prove a mathematical theorem. She is trying to prove that she exists outside of her father's shadow, even as everyone around her keeps measuring her against him. That should feel almost mythic here. Unfortunately, it all too often feels merely well managed. The show's direction is far too tentative, as if Kale trusted the play and his actors so completely that he stopped short of pressing them towards something more dangerous. While the set by Teresa L. Williams provides subtle, haunting effects, like the similar feelings in the script, they are never really fully explored. Instead, we are treated to a solid, safe version of a play that thrives on danger and unpredictability. Nonetheless, the production's greatest pleasures come from Kara Young and Jin Ha as Robert's older daughter Claire, and his former student Hal. These two titans of theater's younger generation bring such a sharp sense of storytelling purpose that they provide a glimpse of what the production could have and should have been. Ha gives Hal an endearing awkwardness and an intellectual hunger that never quite lets you relax around him. He is sweet but not harmless, sincere but not uncomplicated. He understands that Hao's attraction to Catherine, his reverence for Robert, and his professional ambition are not separate impulses. They are tangled together, and Ha lets you see those knots. Young, as is often the case despite being in the smallest of the four roles, is the production's strongest link. As Claire, she delivers some of the most delicious line readings you will hear all season. They are the type of line readings that nearly no one else in the world would think to make. And yet from her, they sound like the only possible way those lines could have been said. What is so thrilling about Young is that she never plays clearly her as simply the uptight sister, the responsible one, the antagonist who swoops in from New York to impose order on Catherine's chaotic life. She lets you see the love inside the control, the fear beneath the judgment. While she grieves just as much as her sister does, her emotions turn her towards logistics, while Catherine's turn her toward volatility. From Catherine's perspective, Claire is callous and unfeeling. But Young's layered performance refuses to let the audience dismiss her just because her sister does. That is the kind of complexity that this production needed more of everywhere. Because the central frustration of this proof is not that Cale has made some disastrous interpretive choice. It is actually quite the opposite. He seems to have made very few interpretive choices at all. The production often feels as though he trusted the strength of the ensemble so completely that that he decided to sit back and let them figure it out. And for the most part, they did. These are enormously talented actors working inside a durable, intelligent play. They make the scenes function, they make the jokes land, they make the relationships readable. But function is a disproportionately low ceiling for this much talent. As has been proven throughout their careers, Deborah and Cheadle are exceptional actors, and there is more than enough in their performances here to suggest that they they are capable of even richer stage work. But it never feels as though the production gives them the tools, permission or pressure to take that next step. Instead, the revival too often settles for the cleanest, least complicated approach to the play. It gives us grief without enough terror, intelligence without enough obsession. And that is what makes the experience of seeing the show so disappointing. Proof is too good of a play to be undone by caution. Auburn's structure still holds. The dialogue still snaps. The emotional machinery still works. There are moments featuring each of the four actors that reveal the play's deeper possibilities. But when the production retreats, instead of embracing abandon, it becomes restrained and confined to a neat little box, happy to sit on the well appointed back porch instead of turning over the text's emotional furniture. So this proof is absolutely worth seeing for the actors and for the enduring story strength of Auburn's text. But it is also a reminder that simply assembling remarkable talent is not the same thing as having a vision for what to do with it. The theorem is sound, the equations balance, and the answer is ultimately correct. But for a play about both the terror and ecstasy of brilliance and instability, this revival believes Catherine too easily trusts Auburn too politely and leaves far too much of the play's danger unproven. The Broadway revival of Proof is scheduled to play the Booth Theater through July 19th. As always, we appreciate your support of Broadway radio. If you want more Broadway radio, head over to patreon.com broadwayradio thank you for giving us of your time and listening. This has been Matt Tamminini and I'll talk to you.
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