proof

Director's Notes on Proof
In David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Proof, Catherine has inherited her father’s mathematical genius and perhaps his madness as well. This statement has been the starting point of the challenging, stimulating and highly rewarding journey which my actors and I have taken this past month.

I knew little about the mathematical state of mind. For years I hadn’t given math much thought. The metaphor expressed by Keith J. Devlin in his book The Math Gene has been very helpful to me: setting up a mathematical problem is like building an abstract house in your mind, constructing walls and rooms. This is where the work comes in. Solving the problem simply requires living in the abstract house and arranging the furniture. Writing the proof then follows upon the discovery that was made while living in the house.
(What seems to separate mathematicians from the rest of us is not an innate skill with numbers but rather the mathematicians’ passion for abstract ideas and symbols which motivate them to construct and then live in these houses of the mind.)

Building the production of Proof can be compared to working on a mathematical problem. The actors have each “constructed” a living, breathing, three-dimensional character. The rooms of the abstract house are the different aspects of personality and behavior of each character. Arranging the furniture is the exploration of relationships between the characters as the story unfolds.

The discoveries we have made and hopefully illuminate for you in this production have to do with the relationship between genius and madness, the nature of work and the nature of truth. Our journey has gone through the mathematical to the spiritual. That mathematical and spiritual matters are interrelated was a new idea for me – I doubt that it will surprise the mathematicians among you.— Cynthia White

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email: carrieapplegate@boisestate.edu