It's a thrill to watch artists at the top of their game.
The play is David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning Proof at American Stage, and the artists are four actors: Katherine Tanner, Brian Shea, Julie Rowe and Tom Nowicki. I've seen two previous versions of this provocative drama – a fine one at Sarasota's Florida Studio Theatre and one by a glum touring company at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center – but in neither production did I have anywhere near as much fun. Because this Proof is special: It includes one iridescent performance after the next, all in the service of a play that's, more than anything, about character.
Oh sure, you'll read critics who claim that Auburn's drama deals with the difficulties of genius or women's chances in a male-dominated culture. But take my word for it: For all its talk of mathematics, or feminist implications, this is fundamentally a play about complicated personalities, and as such cries out for widely talented actors. Which it finds in all four cases at American Stage.
First among equals is Tanner, who plays Catherine, the daughter of a famous mathematician who went mad in his later years, and whom she cared for during his illness. Tanner until recently was a student at Sarasota's FSU/Asolo Conservatory, and I had several opportunities to witness her work there and even to review her a few times.
But nothing she ever did south of St. Petersburg prepared me for the riveting, definitive performance she gives at American Stage. This Catherine is as complicated as any heroine out of Shakespeare: brilliant, impulsive, angry, sarcastic, subject to depression, worried for her mental health, funny, compassionate, irritable, tender. And that's just for starters – Tanner's Katherine is so real, so credibly prismatic, you don't dare take your eyes off her lest you miss a passing color. This is one of the best performances I've seen anywhere in months.
As her romantic interest, Brian Shea is entirely delightful. Shea's long been one of the best actors in the Bay area – a three-time winner of the Weekly Planet's Best of the Bay Award – but recently he hasn't had very challenging roles, so we've lost some perspective on the true size of his talent. That problem is mostly solved by his work as Hal, the young mathematician who idolized Katherine's father and now sets his nervous sights on the genius' mercurial daughter.
Seemingly harmless Hal's presence near Katherine is a result of her father's death: He's taken it upon himself to pore through the great man's hundred-plus notebooks in search of any jottings that might make mathematical history. But when Katherine unexpectedly makes a sexual proposal, he's quick to respond. And when he discovers in one notebook a proof that could set the scientific world on its head, he becomes passionate, fervent, no longer an admitted math "geek" but now an ambassador to the scientific world, with a responsibility to trumpet his find.
A difficulty arises: the authorship of the proof is uncertain, perhaps unverifiable. And now Shea's Hal becomes a detective, skeptical and demanding, perhaps a reliable bloodhound on the trail of truth, perhaps an unconscious victim of unconscious prejudices. Do we share those assumptions? We scrutinize Shea's performance in order to grapple with our own psyches.
No such wrangle is necessary for our appreciation of Julie Rowe as Katherine's older sister Claire. Rowe's a terrific performer, who shined not long ago in A Moon for the Misbegotten and Spinning into Butter, and who so completely transforms herself for every role that I can't begin to guess what her actual character might be.
Her Claire is as consistent as Tanner's Katherine is conflicted. This is a woman who is neat and precise, shuns dark corners and foggy notions and suspects that now Katherine is falling into the same mental illness that years ago ruined their father. Rowe's Claire can be unjust – when she castigates Hal for sleeping with "fragile" Katherine, for example – but she's also caring enough to try to persuade Katherine to come live with her and her fiancé.
Claire's also self-deprecating – she says she inherited one one-thousandth of her father's intellect – and, whatever their impact, her intentions are honorable. Rowe plays the part luminously, with immaculate detail and great humanity.
And finally there's Tom Nowicki in the small part of Katherine and Claire's father, Robert. We only see Robert in flashbacks, in a sort of hallucination, but thanks to Nowicki's deft performance, we can as easily believe in his tremendous intellect as well as his leanings toward madness. The key to making this part work is not overplaying the genius or insanity, and Nowicki comes through with just the right self-restraint.
Do we believe that long-haired Robert is a professor of such distinction that graduate students cower in his presence? Absolutely, without a doubt. And do we accept, in one brief scene, that the man no longer can tell the difference between an elegant equation and pure gibberish? Yes, that too.
Nowicki doesn't have as much to do as the other actors, but he lends dignity and pathos to his celebrated character, and we can see why Katherine might have lent five years to his care. This is careful, wise acting.
Of course, when an ensemble works as well as this one, much credit belongs to the director, Kate Warner, whose work I hope to see more of. I can't be as positive about Mark Kobak's set; his back porch of a house in Chicago is so bland and rectilinear, one can hardly imagine that messy, colorful lives are lived there.
But Amy J. Cianci's costumes are just right for unfashionable academics, and Joseph P. Oshry's lighting very nicely distinguishes time of day. There are also some evocative bits of music between scenes, uncredited in my program.
One further note, which I alluded to earlier: Proof is a superb play, but not, I'm afraid, an important one. That is, for all its richness of person and plotting, it lacks original ideas, a stimulating new vision of human life.
Of course, with roles like these, its philosophical failings might not seem to matter. But with a subject like mathematical genius and a name like Proof, you might find yourself searching for some intellectual buried treasure here. I don't think you'll find it.
What you will discover is a strong plot and, above all else, character – four complex characters played by four extraordinary actors.
And that's four reasons to make sure you don't miss this stirring, satisfying drama.
Local Hero St. Petersburg playwright Bill Leavengood has an opening this week – in New York City at the Sanford Meisner Theater.Leavengood's play Little Mary, opening Thursday and running through June 26, is about a conservative Roman Catholic cardinal and his protégé, a progressive California bishop, whose lives are thrown into turmoil when a 15-year-old Mexican-American claims that she's a virgin and the seven babies she's carrying are children of God.
The play features Broadway and film actor Ron Orbach and Shorecrest Prep graduate Monica Raymund. The play is directed by L.A.-based Jessica Kubzansky.
Locally, Leavengood is best known for his work with the LiveArts Peninsula Foundation, for which he wrote Webb's City: The Musical and Crossing the Bay.
For more information, go to www.littlemary.info.
This article appears in Jun 2-8, 2005.