There was a time, right around the turn of the millennium, when math and madness were simultaneously in vogue.
The physicist Brian Green’s book about string theory, “The Elegant Universe,” was an unlikely hot seller, and in 2001, “A Beautiful Mind,” starred the soft-eyed Russell Crowe as the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. The movie, a sentimental portrait of Nash’s struggle with — and, almost unbelievably, conquest of — schizophrenia, would go on to win four Oscars. Earlier the same year, David Auburn’s “Proof,” a fictional play that imagined a Nash-like polymath haunting his brilliant daughter, had run the board, winning both the Tony Award for best play and a Pulitzer Prize.
Now “Proof” is back on Broadway — it opened on Thursday at the Booth Theater — and you know what they say: The proof is in the pudding. This one seems half-baked. Something about the intervening quarter-century has exposed the weaknesses in Auburn’s play, which was once a standard-setter for domestic drama. That lapsed time has raised questions beyond the dramaturgical, too. For instance, why on earth were we all so eager to romanticize mental illness?
In this quiet and serviceable revival, Thomas Kail directs a starry cast: Ayo Edebiri plays Catherine, the high-strung heir of her father’s dazzling intellect, and Don Cheadle becomes the Nash-manqué, Robert, whose ghostly conversations with Catherine may be a symptom of dawning instability.
At the cost of her own education and independent life, Catherine has taken care of Robert up until his death a week before the play begins, and she’s now having trouble orienting herself without her albatross and lodestar. She’s also turning 25, an age when schizophrenia might manifest. The hidden action of Auburn’s drama occurs inside Catherine’s mind, as she scrutinizes herself for cracks.
Auburn’s story requires a villain — Catherine’s impatient sister, Claire (Kara Young), wants to hustle Catherine straight from their father’s funeral in Chicago to some kind of mental care in New York — and a MacGuffin. This mysterious object is a notebook containing a mathematical proof that is, in some undefined way, wildly important.
No one quite describes the notebook’s contents to us, since civilians could not understand them; instead Hal (Jin Ha), one of Robert’s former students optimistically sifting through Robert’s old writings for gold, vouches for it. “It uses a lot of newer mathematical techniques, things that were developed in the last decade,” Hal says. “Elliptic Curves. Modular Forms. I think I learned more mathematics this week than I did in four years of grad school.”
Catherine, who never completed her undergraduate degree, lays claim to the proof as her own, but through some combination of sexism and covetousness, the others won’t believe her. Catherine’s attempt to break through to them stresses her mind nearly to the point of failure, so her arguments unravel.
But is Catherine really fraying mentally? We can imagine what a realistically depicted psychotic break would look like, and there’s little of that here. Hal, for one, thinks she’s alluring, and the play makes their connection seem tender and respectful and, importantly, sane. According to Auburn’s play, Catherine sleeps a lot and has visions of her father, but her dad just died. Isn’t the better question, why isn’t anyone else upset?
Perhaps in another production, reality — both hers and ours — would seem more unstable, and thus more gripping. Yet Kail’s version undercuts what’s potentially tragic in the play by accentuating the sitcom-esque aspects of Auburn’s scenario. Hal tends to drop by, willy-nilly, popping through Catherine’s gate in a casual way I associate with half-hour comedy, and the comically precise Young has made her thinly drawn executive meanie character sing by finding the clown — imagine Diane Keaton in the first scenes of “Baby Boom” — hidden inside Claire.
Robert’s house, where Catherine has lived nearly all her life, is represented by a large, realistic back-porch set (Teresa L. Williams did the design), which sometimes goes pale and transparent under Amanda Zieve’s lights. During scene transitions, Zieve outlines the house with glowing, neon lines. The result looks like the title-card for some lost 30-minute show on ABC Family. (“That’s Our Genius!,” maybe.)
And while there are serious issues here — loss, death, insanity — the unreality of each character’s behavior makes the whole experience seem oddly light. You’re telling me that Claire, content to let Catherine tend their mentally ill father for years, is now so worried that she won’t let Catherine live alone? And that Catherine, needing to demonstrate her skills, can’t take a minute to describe her workings? Uh-huh.
Still, the father-daughter pair does, at least, perform charmingly together. Cheadle and Edebiri are both down-to-earth and unshowy in their clear affection for each other, and they’re warmly believable as parent and child. Cheadle is laid back to the point of liquidity; he’s the only star I’ve ever seen get entrance applause for lying on a love-seat. Edebiri, though, is in another league. At several points, she manages a crucial stage trick: She can seem to shrink, collapsing inward, while the audience registers an expanding sense of presence. It will serve her beautifully in other roles.
Here Edebiri isn’t preoccupied with delicacy, even the dangerous sort that indicates collapse. The costume designer Dede Ayite puts her in some wonderfully late ’90s outfits — handsome stuff, like a soft-shouldered, gray leather jacket. (This sartorial suavity makes it even wilder that her sister insists that she’s incapable.) Past Catherines have been wispy or spiky, a variety of math girls, interrupted: The great Mary-Louise Parker, a master of otherworldly abstraction, originated the role, which has also featured Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Anne Heche. Edebiri, on the other hand, plays Catherine as a sane but furious woman under a terrific tension, a level of silent agitation that we see even when she turns away.
A theatrical revival can be a welcome visit to an earlier time, or a chance to re-evaluate both a piece of art and a paradigm. This “Proof” returns us to a strange, millennial moment when we all watched “A Beautiful Mind,” or brandished “The Elegant Universe,” while complacently learning no math at all. A revival, though, can also be a microscope.
With an undeniably balanced Catherine, the play’s core mystery evaporates, and we see the flaws in the script more clearly. A play that I remember as being about thought now strikes me as dangerously lacking in that quality; a character I remember as complicated is, in fact, just a palatable gloss on actual dysfunction.
Perhaps when all of us were hearing scientists employ words like “beautiful” and “elegant,” we believed we knew what they meant. But we didn’t, not really. And here we have the proof.
Proof Through July 19 at the Booth Theater, Manhattan; proofbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
Helen Shaw is the chief theater critic for The Times.
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