Don Cheadle was not itching to return to the theater, where he last appeared 25 years ago in the Off Broadway premiere of Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog.” With numerous TV and film commitments — including multiple turns as a Marvel superhero — the theater, he said, “just was never on my radar.”
Another sticking point: the time commitment. “I was kind of not thinking about being here,” in New York, “for four months or five months,” said Cheadle, who lives in Santa Monica. “I couldn’t get my head around it.”
But sometimes it’s only that the right factors have yet to align, like when the award-winning director of “Hamilton” (Thomas Kail) comes calling, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “Proof” (David Auburn) wants you for a revival of his canonical work and you are told you’ll be performing opposite Ayo Edebiri, an Emmy-winning star of “The Bear.”
“I’m just a fan of her talent,” Cheadle, 61, said of Edebiri, 30. “She’s very funny and dramatic, has a lot of range, and has a dark and wry sense of humor. And I just thought, this play is traditionally not a Black family, and thinking about playing her father, and what that dynamic would be like, it just made sense.”
And so Cheadle is making his Broadway debut alongside Edebiri, who’s also making hers, in Kail’s revival of “Proof” at the Booth Theater. She’s Catherine, a 25-year-old in Chicago grieving the death of her father, Cheadle’s Robert, a brilliant mathematics professor who struggled with madness. Catherine also seems to be showing signs of the same debilitating mental illness that afflicted her father — or is she? That is one of the questions raised in a story that, with an African American family now at its center, is playing a little differently 25 years after it won the Tony Award for best play.
Working together has been “even cooler than we imagined,” Edebiri told me when I interviewed the two co-stars at the theater in early April. “Even in that first reading, I was like, ‘Oh, why do I feel like we know each other or something?’”
The play’s weighty themes include mental health, intergenerational wealth and academic outsiderness, which culminate in a central conflict: When one of Robert’s former graduate students, Hal, discovers a mind-blowing “proof” in a notebook in his desk, Catherine claims authorship. Neither Hal nor Catherine’s older sister, Claire, who has traveled from New York for the funeral, thinks she is capable of writing “something mathematicians have been trying to demonstrate since … since there were mathematicians.”
Their skepticism drives the rest of the story, subtly exposing their biases — and the audience’s — around gender, genius and, in this version, race.
That complexity was apparent to Edebiri about a decade ago, when she first read the script as an undergraduate studying playwriting and TV writing at New York University. “I just remember being like, ‘That’s a perfect play,’” she said. “And you go through it and talk about structure, language and the dramatic setup.” But she had never seen a full stage production, just “different girls do scenes from it for the showcase or something else at the end of the semester.”
Then there were “all the great girls,” as she put it, describing the celebrated actresses, all of them white, who have preceded her in the role. Mary-Louise Parker. Jennifer Jason Leigh. Gwyneth Paltrow (in the 2005 movie).
“I had a certain preconception in my mind of what it was,” Edebiri said. Reading the play again as she considered taking the role, she was “surprised,” she said, “by how much resonated and in the ways that it did.”
“I don’t really cry very much in my life,” she said, “and I was crying reading this, and I was very surprised by that. And then I called Tommy back and I was like, ‘OK, I guess we have to do this, right?’”
(She also spoke to Parker, who won a Tony for her portrayal of Catherine. “It’s good because it’s good for the weirdos,” she recalled Parker saying approvingly. “It’s good for the girls like us.”)
As for Cheadle, the show’s themes of isolation and illness also hit home. He and his siblings grew up as “academic brats,” moving around with their parents as they pursued advanced degrees. His mother, Bettye Cheadle, became a teacher; his father, Donald Cheadle Sr., was a clinical psychologist.
“My dad ended up being at these universities where he was probably one of the only Black people there at the time,” he said of his father, who died in 2020. (His mother died in 2016, after living with Alzheimer’s.) “Also, what our parents went through with mental health issues, and how we dealt with the care-taking,” he added. “There’s just a lot of things reverberating every night for me.”
In one scene that is at once captivating and heartbreaking, Catherine realizes that Robert is in a state of permanent delusion. He’s on a high, convinced he has had a breakthrough, but as Catherine opens the notebook she sees that all he has written is gibberish. Her reaction goes from disappointment to tender and protective.
In her review, The New York Times’s chief theater critic, Helen Shaw, noted that the actors perform charmingly together: They “are both down-to-earth and unshowy in their clear affection for each other, and they’re warmly believable as parent and child.”
Their connection extends beyond the stage. After rehearsals, they often saw plays together, and still grab meals with their castmates, Kara Young and Jin Ha, whenever they can. “I have kids that are very close to Ayo’s age and they’re both Libra. She’s a Libra. There’s just all of this stuff that felt like it was very easy,” he said. “We work in a similar way and have the same sort of ethos about what it is that we’re trying to accomplish.”
Family is how Kail thinks of the play, which he saw on Broadway with his parents when he was 25. During our video interview, he recalled thinking: “This isn’t really about math.” He had considered reviving it Off Broadway in 2019, and reached out to Auburn. “I’m always most impacted by revivals that allow the play to be a prism in which you can shine a light through that’s different than the original source,” Kail said.
For this production, Kail felt that having actors of color would change the stakes. He cited, for example, Claire’s plan to give up the family home after Robert dies and take Catherine back to New York City for her younger sister’s well-being: “What it means for this family, this Black family in the world of academia, to sell the house to the university is a completely different conversation.”
Kail noted that Auburn was open to revisiting his story, but only when the right ensemble came together. “We all said Ayo’s name very quickly,” Kail said. “I first saw her in ‘The Bear.’ And I thought her mind was so active, and it feels like there are 10 things she’s thinking and one thing she’s saying. And there’s something about that, that just felt like it rhymed with Catherine, someone who had more here than could be expressed and was trying to find a way to express that.”
Auburn eventually made minor updates to his script to reflect the casting. In one scene, for example, Claire confronts Catherine about calling the police on Hal, whom Catherine catches trying to take one of her father’s notebooks. In the original text, after Claire relays the officers’ suspicion that Catherine might have made up the incident (Hal left before they arrived), she tells her sister, “The police said you were abusive.”
But, after discussions during rehearsals, Auburn reworked the language and its implied physical altercation, while also keeping the racial stereotype often applied to African Americans: “The police said you were aggressive.”
“It did seem like in 2026, with a Black family, this little visit that’s described from the police just lands differently than it did in 2000 with a white family,” Auburn said.
Auburn does not think that all plays need to speak to the current moment. “I don’t think art necessarily has to do that,” he said. “I think transporting us to a different set of concerns and grounding us in that and doing that in a community is also really valuable.”
But Edebiri appreciates the updates and contemporary nods. “So many people are coming, and they’re young people who are experiencing things for the first time,” she said, a bit teary-eyed as she reflected on the play and the politics of today. “And that just gives me some sort of hope that we can all just keep trying to find each other and connect with each other and remember each other in our humanity.”
Cinematography by Jensen Gore
Salamishah Tillet is a contributing critic at large for The Times and a professor at Rutgers University. She won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2022, for columns examining race and Black perspectives as the arts and entertainment world responded to the Black Lives Matter moment with new works.
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