drama

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While continuing to work in the theater, David Hare turned to television in 1973 to write and produce //Man Above Men// for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), followed by //Licking Hitler//, which Hare authored and directed for the BBC in 1978, //Dreams of Leaving// (1980), and //Saigon: Year of the Cat// (1983). In 1985, Hare adapted his play //Plenty// for the motion-picture screen and also wrote and directed //Wetherby//, which some critics regarded as a better film than //Plenty//. //Wetherby// demonstrated that Hare could work effectively in the medium of film as a total artist. Other Hare films are //Paris by Night// (1988) and //Strapless// (1989). He directed the film of Wallace Shawn’s //The Designated Mourner// in 1997. David Hare has been identified as a socialist playwright, a committed artist whose concerns are predominantly moral and often satiric. His work reflects the stance of the “angry” writers of the 1950’s carried forward into a second generation of “furious” playwrights, as Jack Kroll has aptly described them. Hare’s English characters are shaped by the postwar realities of British life; some of them (such as Susan, the central character of //Plenty//) have not properly adjusted to a changing world, while others (such as Curly, the central character of //Knuckle//) have adjusted at the expense of becoming hardened and cynical or morally complacent. Hare has a genius for drawing strong, distinctive characters who often behave outrageously. Although many of the plays are set in his native England, his concerns are global, as reflected by increasingly international and exotic settings for the later plays: New York, Leningrad, Saigon, India, and the People’s Republic of China, for example. He has also extended his work from the stage to film and television. Hare has a unique talent for dramatizing people under pressure and confronted with crises—social, commercial, moral, revolutionary, and political. His scope is impressively broad, and his concerns in general involve issues of truth, honesty, and integrity. Indeed, the title of one of his most successful plays of the 1980’s, //Pravda//, means “truth.” Hare has been favorably compared with Bertolt Brecht (for //Fanshen//, his documentary play about the Chinese Revolution, “the nearest any English contemporary writer has come to emulating Brecht,” in the estimation of Michael Coveney) and Harold Pinter, perhaps the most gifted playwright of the previous generation. Among younger talents, the volume and quality of his work may perhaps be matched by Tom Stoppard, but few others. After the success of //Slag// in 1970, Hare won the //Evening Standard// Award for Most Promising Playwright. In 1974, //Knuckle// won for him the John Llewellyn Rhys Award. In 1979, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts voted //Licking Hitler// the Best Television Play of the Year. In 1985, the film //Wetherby//, which Hare both wrote and directed, won the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear Award. //The Secret Rapture// was named the best play for 1988 by //Drama Magazine//. Hare’s awards also include the New York Drama Critics Circle Award (1983), the Olivier Award (1990 and 1996), and the London Theatre Critics’ Award (1990). David Hare1**Biography** David Hare was born in Bexhill, England, on June 5, 1947, the son of Clifford Theodore Rippon and the former Agnes Gillmour, his wife. Hare was first educated at Lancing College (among his classmates were future playwright Christopher Hampton and lyricist Tim Rice) before going on to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he earned a master’s degree, with honors, in 1968. Hare began writing plays at the age of twenty-two. In 1970, his first full-length play, //Slag//, about three women teachers locked in a power struggle over a failing English boarding school, won for him the Most Promising Playwright Award granted by the //Evening Standard//, even though the play was not favorably received by some feminists, who considered the playwright to be sexist; others went so far as to call him a misogynist. //The New York Times// drama critic Clive Barnes described //Slag// as a metaphor for the decline of English society, following Hare’s suggestion that the play was not so much about women as institutions. Also in 1970, Hare married Margaret Matheson, a marriage that produced three children before ending in divorce in 1980. In 1992, he married Nicole Farhi, a designer. From the beginning of his theatrical career in 1968 when he cofounded the Portable Theatre (with Howard Brenton and Snoo Wilson), an experimental troupe that toured Great Britain, Hare demonstrated an interest in creative dramatic collaboration and in theatrical direction, as well as in writing plays. In 1969, Hare became literary manager of the Royal Court Theatre, and in 1970 he was appointed resident dramatist. (//Slag// was first produced at the Hampstead Theatre Club before being moved to the Royal Court.) After working at the Royal Court, Hare served as resident playwright at the Nottingham Playhouse, where his play //Brassneck// (written in collaboration with Howard Brenton), which traced corruption through three generations of a Midlands family, premiered in 1973. In 1974, Hare cofounded Joint Stock, another fringe company; //Fanshen// was done as a Joint Stock production in the city of Sheffield. As a young man, Hare once worked for Pathé Pictorial and went on to write for television productions after having established himself as a successful playwright. //Saigon: Year of the Cat// was directed by Stephen Frears for Thames Television in 1983, for example, but his earlier award-winning teleplay, //Licking Hitler//, Hare wrote and directed himself for the BBC in 1978. In 1985, his film //Wetherby//, which Hare also wrote and directed, earned the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival and received a large measure of critical acclaim internationally. Hare wrote the screenplay adaptation of //Plenty//, one of his most successful plays, for a major motion picture that starred Meryl Streep, Charles Dance, and Sir John Gielgud and was directed by Fred Schepisi and released by Twentieth Century-Fox. Having earned a reputation as a sometimes controversial national playwright during the 1970’s, Hare had established himself by the mid-1980’s as a multifaceted writer and director of international scope and importance. After 1975, Hare began to write for the National Theatre which produced //Plenty//, //A Map of the World//, and //Pravda//, and beginning in 1984, Hare served as associate director of the National Theatre in London. David Hare’s creative work can be sorted into three categories: plays he wrote and directed himself, scripts written for film and television productions, and plays written in collaboration with Howard Brenton and others. In discussing Hare for the journal //Modern Drama//, C. W. E. Bigsby described the playwright as having been shaped by his times, the political turmoil and social upheaval of the student rebellions of 1968 and the growing dissent over Western policy in Southeast Asia. Bigsby also noted that 1968 was the year that “marked the beginnings of the theatrical fringe in London.” Active in fringe theater from the beginning of his dramatic career, Hare became one of the architects of the fringe movement. Early in his career, for example, Hare became interested in dramatic collaboration, which later led to successful partnerships with Howard Brenton—//Brassneck// in 1973 and //Pravda// in 1985. At the Royal Court Theatre in 1971, Hare instigated an experiment in group collaboration that resulted in the play //Lay By//, a group Biography2 effort of seven writers (Trevor Griffiths, Brian Clark, Stephen Poliakoff, Hugh Stoddard, and Snoo Wilson, along with Brenton and Hare), stimulated by a //Sunday Times// feature by Ludovic Kennedy, concerning an ambiguous rape case that might have resulted in an erroneous conviction. The Royal Court rejected the play, but Hare’s colleagues in the Portable Theatre Company mounted a production directed by Wilson in conjunction with the Traverse Theatre at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The Portable Theatre also produced another collective effort in which Hare was involved as a writer, //England’s Ireland//, in 1972. The rationale for the Portable Theatre was political. The idea was to have a touring company that would address working-class audiences, an “antagonistic theatre,” as Brenton described it, designed for “people who have never seen the theatre before.” The plays produced were intended to be controversial in nature (//Lay By// was an exercise in sexual politics, for example, reconstructing a rape and interspersing the reconstruction with a pornographic photo session) and to challenge conventional assumptions and the traditional forms and methods of the established theater. Hare has a particular genius for designing ingeniously constructed, unpredictable plots and strong, ambiguous characters that defy immediate classification and interpretation. The male characters tend to be flawed, either because they are infirm of purpose and self-deceived, or because they are all too purposeful and self-assured, in some instances even brutal. In Hare’s male characters, civilized behavior and even signals of basic decency can be signs of weakness. In //Pravda//, Andrew May’s apparently “good” qualities (bourgeois ambition, a dedication to the work ethic, a capacity for moral outrage) are in fact merely the product of an unthinking liberal idealism, which easily gives way to his monstrous hatred for Le Roux and his absolute thirst for vengeance. Brock, the diplomat in //Plenty//, is also misled by his emotions. “Decent” people are not survivors in the kind of world Hare imagines, a world that requires intellectual toughness for survival. The idealist, like the sympathetic Darwin of //Plenty//, cannot stand a chance when countered by the unfeeling pragmatists who operate the machinery of state. Hare’s men, often dominated by career ambitions, gradually lose their integrity while serving the corrupt and corrupting establishment of government and big business. They give themselves to these enterprises and are transformed into cogs in the machinery of state, disposable and interchangeable parts. The career diplomat Darwin of //Plenty//, for example, has given a lifetime of loyal service to the Foreign Office but is betrayed by his superiors during the Suez Crisis. Determined to speak his mind and tell the truth, an honorable course of action, he is crushed and his career ruined. This is the sort of career from which Susan extricates her husband, but Brock, lacking her perspective, can only regret the career loss and resent Susan’s interference. The male characters, then, are driven by ambition and the lure of professional success; their vision will be clouded and their integrity compromised. Brock is not a fool, but he will not conclude, as Susan apparently does, that a state bureau that will betray a career loyalist such as Darwin and make a scapegoat of him is not worthy of one’s service. In //Pravda//, with its broad, satiric distortions, Andrew can be seen as a fool because his self-betrayal is expanded to farcical proportions. In a more restrained context, Andrew might be seen as a parallel figure to Brock. In the end, Andrew’s integrity is compromised when he goes back to Le Roux to edit the sleaziest tabloid in England, but the man is so stupidly devoted to his profession that he hardly seems to care that he has lost his integrity and self-respect. Rebecca has attempted to clarify his decision and to explain the consequences, but to no avail. In a more subtle way, Susan performs a similar function for Brock in //Plenty//, but Brock is so ordinary, so average, and so typical in his ambition that audiences may miss the point. //Plenty// may be mistaken for domestic melodrama (even though Susan is hardly a typical melodramatic heroine), but the movement is toward pathos and tragedy in the way men allow themselves to be transformed and corrupted into banality. The meaning of //Pravda// is the more easily recognized by its satiric approach and farcical distortions. Even so, Gavin Millar, in //Sight and Sound//, praised //Plenty// as “one of the few recent texts, in theatre or cinema, that undertakes an unpretentious but serious review of postwar Britain’s decline.” Analysis3 The Great Exhibition In this context, Hare may be regarded as a social critic functioning as a practicing dramatist with a flair for satire. His play //The Great Exhibition// is a political satire treating a Labour member of Parliament, Charles Hammett, swept into office during the great Labour victory of 1965 and swept out of office when the Conservative Party returned to power in 1970. Peter Ansorge has called the play a parody of “middle-class playwrights who have turned to working-class communities both for inspiration and as an escape from the more subtle dilemmas of their own environment and class.” Fanshen Hare’s interest in politics is also obvious in //Fanshen//, a play based on a book by William Hinton, an American who went to China “as a tractor technician,” as Hare has described him, “both to observe and help the great land reform programmes of the late 1940’s.” Hare felt “an obligation to portray Chinese peasants” of the village of Log Bow “in a way which was adequate to their suffering” but was “not interested in portraying the scenes of violence and brutality which marked the landlords’ regime and its overthrow.” After seeing the play, Hinton objected to Hare’s “liberal slant” and urged the playwright to revise the play so as to provide a clear Marxist emphasis, but Hare incorporated only a few of Hinton’s list of 110 suggested emendations. //Fanshen// (the title is translated as “to turn the body,” or, alternatively, “to turn over”) was written for the Joint Stock Company in 1974 and opened in Sheffield before moving on to the ICA Terrace Theatre in London in April of 1975. Teeth ’n’ Smiles As has been noted, Hare’s artistic sensibilities were no doubt influenced by the events of 1968, and his early work suggests a theater of political commitment and protest, carried into the 1970’s. His play //Teeth ’n’ Smiles//, produced in 1975 at the Royal Court Theatre, has been called “a metaphor for British society” and “an elegy for the vanished visions of the late Sixties” because of the way it treats rock music and popular culture. The action is set at Cambridge on June 9, 1969, and centers on a performance of a rock band for the May Ball of Jesus College. This concert proves to be a disaster when Maggie, the lead singer of the group, gets drunk, insults the audience, and is finally sent to prison on a drug charge. The musicians regard their privileged audience with contempt: “Rich complacent self-loving self-regarding self-righteous phoney half-baked politically immature evil-minded little shits.” Interviewed about the play by //Theatre Quarterly//, Hare claimed it was intended to question “whether we have any chance of changing ourselves.” In his survey //British Theatre Since 1955: A Reassessment// (1979), Ronald Hayman criticizes the play for setting up Cambridge as symbolizing a repressive capitalist system, concluding that “this kind of play bases its appeal on giving the audience a chance to believe that there is a common enemy which can be fought.” Hare’s targets in this play are self-delusion, class guilt, and class war, but the play mainly attacks the upscale educational establishment, represented by Cambridge (which Hare knew at firsthand), and has been regarded as an indictment of the detached university intellectuals. Knuckle The protagonist of //Knuckle//, which opened at London’s Comedy Theatre in March of 1974, is far removed from the privileged setting of Cambridge. He is a tough-minded vulgarian who is pragmatic and cynical about the hypocrisy of his world and his own family. Curly Delafield has returned to his home in Guildford seeking information about the disappearance of his sister Sarah, who had worked as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital. Curly is a blunt and brutal man. He had not seen his sister in twelve years, but he is determined to discover Analysis4 what has happened to her. Sarah’s overcoat was found on the beach at Eastbourne, famous for a ghastly murder that was committed there in the spring of 1924. Apparently Sarah either committed suicide or was murdered. The play therefore involves a process of detection, as those close to Sarah, a journalist named Max, her friend Jenny, and her father, are subjected to Curly’s relentless interrogation. The mystery of her disappearance is solved at the end, after a sordid story of scandal and blackmail has been brought to light. Curly is extremely cynical, a man who has been involved in selling arms, and in this regard he resembles in his amoral outlook the character of Andrew Undershaft in George Bernard Shaw’s play //Major Barbara// (1905). Curly is habitually skeptical of men and their motives, including his own father. His view of the world is revealed by his motto: “Every man has his own gun. That’s not a metaphor. That’s a fact.” In a mean world, Curly does not “pick fights” but merely provides weapons: “They’re going to kill each other with or without my help,” he claims. London is viewed as the corrupt center of a corrupt and fallen world, and the corruption has spread to Guildford. As Curly remarks at the end of the play, “In the mean square mile of the City of London they were making money. Back to my guns.” Nearly everyone in this play is contaminated by money. //Knuckle// is experimental in the way it mixes genres. The play develops as an apparent murder mystery, a whodunit that leaves open the possibility of suicide but turns out to be merely a parody of a conventional thriller. The sleuth Curly is like a stripped-down, plain-spoken Andrew Undershaft wearing a Mike Hammer mask, a very private eye. In fact, however, the play is an allegory of family betrayal, capitalist greed, and corruption. Hare’s declared intention in writing it was “to subvert the form of the thriller to a serious end.” Curly is not a likable character because he is so cynical and so crude, but his character, shaped by the world that has molded it, is at least redeemed by his brutal honesty. He is not self-deluded, as so many of Hare’s characters seem to be. A Map of the World One of Hare’s most ambitious plays that attempts to take on human delusion on a global scale is //A Map of the World//, first performed at London’s Lyttleton Theatre in January of 1983. The title comes from Oscar Wilde: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at. . . ,” and the central conflict is a philosophical argument between a Marxist idealist, Stephen Andrews, and a conservative “realist,” an expatriate celebrity Indian writer named Victor Mehta; the two have been invited to address a UNESCO conference on world poverty in Bombay. The play is complicated by the way it is framed, with the action shifting from the original confrontation to a filmed reconstruction being shot in London, as the audience realizes when scene 1 gives way to scene 2. This polemical play has been criticized for being too experimental in its framework and conception and too ambitious in scope, taking on issues of artistic freedom, world poverty, Third World nationalism, political compromise, and the decline of Western civilization, in the midst of a rhetorical contest partly based on sexual jealousy. “Unarguably,” Hare has confessed, “I was trying to do too many things at once, and although I have now directed three productions of the play, I cannot ever quite achieve the right balance between the different strands.” Plenty Hare describes //A Map of the World// as a “disputatious play” that intended “to sharpen up people’s minds, to ask them to remember why they believe what they do.” Perhaps this goal was better achieved in the earlier play, //Plenty//, despite the puzzlement over motivation evident in the reviews of the later film version. //Plenty// Analysis5 was one of Hare’s most successful plays but also one of his most ambiguous. It was first performed at London’s Lyttleton Theatre in 1978, starring Kate Nelligan as Susan Traherne, the protagonist, before going on to Broadway. In 1985, Hare reshaped the script for the motion picture adaptation. The film version rearranged the opening, starting the action at St. Benoît, France, in November of 1943, rather than in the Knightsbridge area of London in 1962, presumably to establish Susan’s character from the start as a young Englishwoman serving the French Resistance behind enemy lines during World War II. Thereafter, in general, the film follows the chronology of the play, which mainly concerns Susan’s difficulty in adjusting to civilian and domestic life in England after the war in the time of “plenty” that was to follow. The play seems to document a movement from innocence to insanity, as Susan restlessly moves from one job to another and from one relationship to another, presumably trying to recapture the excitement she knew with her wartime lover, a British agent in France known only by his code name, Lazar. After a brief flirtation with a working-class lover named Mick, whom she had selected to father a child in a liaison that only proved frustrating to both of them, she agrees to marry a career diplomat, Raymond Brock, whose career she later destroys for no clearly explained reason. With regard to Susan, Hare has written that he was struck by a statistic “that seventy-five percent of the women flown behind the lines for the Special Operations Executive were subsequently divorced after the war.” The play, which dramatizes Susan’s restlessness in this context, has been criticized for its failure to explain her motives. After all, Raymond Brock seems to be a decent character who sincerely cares for his disturbed wife. Hare describes him as a young man of “delightful ingenuousness” and has noted that it would be a mistake to play him as a fool. His character is blemished, however, by the corrupt institution he serves, the Foreign Office. In a less obvious way than Andrew May in //Pravda//, Brock is ruined by his professionalism and his dedication to an unworthy career. On the surface, Susan may appear to be maladjusted and irrational. She expresses the need to “move on” several times during the course of the play, but at first glance it seems that she is only able to “move on” from one job to another or from one relationship to another. Psychologically, she does not seem to be able to “move on” from the excitement of love and life behind enemy lines during the war. When she is much later reunited with Lazar in England, she discovers that he has “moved on” to shabby domesticity and a life without joy or enthusiasm. The danger of “moving on” in the sense of adjusting to a changing commonplace world is that this could mean nothing more than accepting banal conformity. Susan’s character is vibrant because she resists that kind of commonplace adjustment. Hare has written that men “are predisposed to find Susan Traherne unsympathetic.” The commonplace judgment likely to be made about Susan is that she is emotionally unstable, if not completely deranged. “It’s a common criticism of my work,” Hare notes in his postscript to the play, “that I write about women whom I find admirable, but whom the audience dislikes.” The case against Susan “makes itself, or is made by the other characters,” Hare adds, but the character is remarkable in her fierce independence and quite extraordinary in her behavior, which Hare believes should create “a balance of sympathy” throughout the play. Hare has written that he intended to show through Susan “the struggle of a heroine against a deceitful and emotionally stultified class.” Her motives are submerged and complex, no doubt, but if that is a criticism of the character, it is one that could also be leveled at Hamlet. The mystery of motivation is not necessarily a flaw in a complex and enduring drama. Pravda Hare’s most critically acclaimed play after //Plenty// was //Pravda//, a biting satire of farcical dimensions on the newspaper industry in Great Britain and the dangers of collusion between Whitehall and Fleet Street, between government and the press. //Pravda// was written with Hare’s earlier collaborator Brenton and appears to be a Analysis6 not-so-thinly-veiled attack upon the brand of journalism represented by the Australian press tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who took over //The Times// of London, just as //Pravda//’s central character, Lambert Le Roux (from South Africa rather than Australia) takes over the most influential establishment in Brenton and Hare’s fictional London, //The Victory//. //Pravda// premiered at the National Theatre in 1985, with Anthony Hopkins gaining rave notices for his caricature of Le Roux. Murdoch was reportedly angered by the play. Trevor Nunn, enjoying the limelight of //Les Misérables// (1985), which he directed and adapted as a musical from Victor Hugo’s novel, told //Newsweek// that Murdoch “was extremely incensed and sent out the word to get the National and the RSC [Royal Shakespeare Company, whose London home is the Barbican Arts Centre], the two subsidized theatres” in Great Britain. Nunn and Peter Hall, who was instrumental in creating the three-auditorium National Theatre complex on London’s South Bank, were both disappointed that the government of Margaret Thatcher did not support the integrity of the National Theatre in the “totally corrupt campaign” (as Hall described it) that followed. When government subsidies to the arts were cut (threatening to close down the National’s smallest experimental auditorium in the complex), the director of the National must have sensed political pressure nearly as bizarre and dangerous as what is imagined in the Brenton and Hare play. //Pravda// shows Hare’s skill as a gadfly, questioning not only journalistic ethics but the larger issue of truth in journalism as well. This “comedy of excess” (as Hare described it) concerns the monopolizing of newspapers in England by the ruthless Lambert Le Roux. The action opens with Le Roux’s takeover of a provincial paper, the //Leicester Bystander//, hardly a paradigm for journalistic ethics even before Le Roux’s bid. Moira Patterson, a local shop owner maligned by the newspaper by mistake, goes to the editorial offices to demand a retraction. The cynical editor, Harry Morrison, and his subordinate, Andrew May (soon to become the new editor-in-chief) tell her “we. . . don’t publish corrections,” because “what is printed must be true,” and so “to print corrections is a kind of betrayal” of the public trust. May considers this perverse logic a matter of journalistic ethics. This satiric introduction to an already corrupt world of journalism hardly inspires confidence in the //Leicester Bystander// and what it represents. The corruption of this provincial paper, however, pales in comparison to Andrew’s later experiences as editor of //The Victory//, a national paper, a “paper for England.” Although billed as a comedy and often howlingly funny, //Pravda// is an extremely bitter satire that manages to strike out at corruption in high places and to spoof newspapers at all levels and television journalism as well. Besides //The Victory//, Le Roux owns a gutter tabloid (famous for its nudes) called //The Tide// and also attempts to take over a left-wing paper called //The Usurper// (shades of //The Guardian//?). Once in power, Le Roux fires underlings with the gleeful abandon of the Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carroll’s //Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland// (1865). A fired journalist from //The Victory// regrets most that he will never again appear on a television talk show called //Speak or Shut Up//. Now, he will have to “sit at home shouting at the television like ordinary people.” In his bluntness, Le Roux resembles the unsentimental Curly of //Knuckle//, blown up to monstrous proportions, a vindictive Citizen Kane running amok. There is no clever Hamlet to counter the villainy of this Claudius, as Hare’s satire seems to be moving in the direction of tragedy. The tragic vision depends on a sense of justice, however, and finally all that appears in Hare’s bitter satiric world is a sense of the absurd so total that railing against it is clearly pointless. Andrew’s wife, Rebecca, gives him a “leaked” document that indicates a breach of public trust by the Minister of Defence concerning the transport of plutonium in flasks that are demonstrably unsafe. When Andrew decides to print the story in //The Victory//, Le Roux fires him. When Andrew and other fired journalists from //The Victory// take over //The Usurper//, Le Roux and his subordinate trick them into running libelous stories about their former employer, then threaten Andrew with litigation and bankruptcy. Analysis7 At the end, Andrew is humiliated into begging Le Roux’s forgiveness and editing //The Tide// as a means of penance. Practicing journalism is more important to him, finally, than ethics, integrity, truth, or love. A muddled idealist not fully understanding his presumed convictions, Andrew deserves to become a lackey to the demoniac Le Roux, devoting his skill to purveying falsehood and smut, the foreman of what Le Roux calls his “foundry of lies.” Rebecca, who loves Andrew, is forced to abandon him after he succumbs to his bloodlust for revenge against Le Roux (his tragic flaw, if this play could be a tragedy) and after he finally sells his soul to the demon magnate who believes “No one tells the truth. Why single out newspapers?” Rebecca is the only character clever enough to see through Le Roux’s deviousness, but she is powerless to take action against him. Otherwise, this bitter, satiric world is populated by mean-spirited, unscrupulous, dishonest people. Paris by Night and Strapless Hare’s later plays and films continued to advance his criticism of Tory society and Thatcherism. His films //Paris by Night// (starring Charlotte Rampling and Michael Gambon) and //Strapless// (starring Blair Brown, Bridget Fonda, and Bruno Ganz) extended his interest in conflicted women characters trying to resolve the contradictions in their lives. To prepare himself for //Paris by Night//, Hare attended the annual Tory party conference in Blackpool to observe closely the “new Tory woman,” as he described, in his introduction to the screenplay published by Faber and Faber in 1988, the new breed of women who entered conservative politics in Great Britain during the Thatcher years. Also in 1988, he created his most sympathetic woman character, Isobel Glass, for his play //The Secret Rapture//. Isobel is set in conflict with her sister, Marion French, who has become a Thatcherite junior minister and who believes that not to make money is “worse than stupid; it’s irresponsible.” The humanistic Isobel is saintly and is ultimately destroyed by the morally corrupt world that she inhabits. Racing Demon Hare then began a trilogy of plays dealing with British institutions. The first play of the trilogy, //Racing Demon//, is about ecclesiastical betrayal and the Church of England and focuses on a well-meaning minister who lost his faith in God but found purpose in serving the needy. The minister’s career, however, is threatened and ruined by his superiors for political reasons. Murmuring Judges Another play, //Murmuring Judges//, concerns the legal system. A note on the curtain of the Olivier Theatre explained the title: “In Scottish law, a form of contempt, meaning ‘to speak ill of the judiciary’ or ‘to scandalize the court.’” Hare added in a note to the play, published by Faber and Faber, “It is still an offense in Scottish law.” The published text of //Murmuring Judges// begins with a quotation from Ogden Nash: “Professional people have no cares/ Whatever happens, they get theirs.” The play is about moral corruption and compromise in the prison service (a young Irishman is jailed and brutalized unjustly) and about an idealistic woman lawyer who is taught a lesson about how justice operates in England. Hare therefore continued to write from a position of political outrage, satirizing and dramatizing the foibles of his time. The Absence of War The third play in the trilogy, //The Absence of War//, combines the cinematic spectacle of //Murmuring Judges// with a simple plot line reminiscent of //Racing Demon//. Based on the Labour Party and its attempt to win power in the general election of 1992, //The Absence of War// was the product of much research by Hare, who Analysis8 interviewed reporters, politicians, and their advisers. Dramatizing the workings of the British parliament and the electoral process, the play also includes a critique of the Labour Party and its failure to govern or unite English society. Amy’s View, The Judas Kiss, and The Blue Room After this trilogy, which questioned the Church of England, the British legal system, and, finally, the Labour Party, Hare turned to less overtly political plays. His next play, //Amy’s View//, is a witty examination of the troubled relations of a stage actress and her daughter, from whose perspective the story is told. However, although this is a play centered on a personal relationship between two women, the narrative also is a metaphor for the political ups and downs of Britain in postwar society. //The Judas Kiss//, a short play written during the same period, is also a story of a personal relationship between two people, speculating on what might have happened behind closed doors between playwright Oscar Wilde and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1997 Hare freely adapted Austrian dramatist Arthur Schnitzler’s famous play, //Reigen// (pb. 1900, pr. 1920; //Hands Around//, 1920; also as //La Ronde//, 1959). Like the original, Hare’s play explored the erotic drive as a ruthless and powerful force in modern life. Retitled //The Blue Room//, this production attracted much attention because of the nudity of its star character, which perhaps overshadowed the play’s message. Skylight The most important play following the trilogy, however, is //Skylight//, which was first performed in England in 1995 and won the 1996 Olivier Award. //Skylight// was written with reference to the era in British life from 1979 to 1990, when Margaret Thatcher presided over a shift from a socialist economy to a free market society in England. The play concerns the possible reconciliation between two estranged lovers, whose lives diverged when Britain’s old socialist economy unraveled. The break between the two principal characters, a teacher named Kyra and a businessman named Tom, is also symbolic of divisions within English society itself. The prosperous Tom, who appreciates “the good life,” is contrasted with Kyra, whose life of service and personal sacrifice has led to significant material discomfort. As in //Amy’s View//, a close relationship between two people is blended with larger political and social themes—in this case the question is the sustainability of a society that has hopelessly divided itself into two separate political and philosophic camps. Like his other plays, //Skylight// continues Hare’s exploration of social and political fragmentation in postwar Britain and indicates the need for a new consensus that will allow for balance rather than dogged opposition. Via Dolorosa In 1997, the Royal Court Theatre sent Hare on a series of trips to the Middle East to gather material for a play on the conflicts in the region. Hare ended up writing not a play but a dramatic monologue titled //Via Dolorosa//, which he performed himself in London and New York, and which eventually became a television play. In the course of his monologue, Hare relates the views of more than thirty people from the region, including both Palestinians and Israelis. In addition to exploring the tensions in the Middle East, Hare also explores his own values and spiritual life, his own personal “via dolorosa.” Hare ends by contrasting those in the Middle East, whose lives are passionately involved in issues of faith and politics, with the foundering convictions and commitments of British society. Like his previous work, //Via Dolorosa// takes a specific and situation and heightens it so that it can come to stand for a general and important political or moral situation. My Zinc Bed Hare continued to wed the personal and the political with //My Zinc Bed//, his first play of the twenty-first century. Like some of his other plays, this was already “in the air,” inspired by the case of Audrey Kishline, Analysis9 the founder of a support group advocating moderation in contradistinction to Alcoholics Anonymous’s (AA’s) well-known policy of abstinence. In the play it is the character Victor who represents the Kishline perspective. An Internet entrepreneur and former communist, Victor, like Kishline, ends up driving while intoxicated and dying in a car crash. His opposite number is Paul, a poet, an alcoholic in recovery who subscribes to the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. Like //Skylight//, this play once again opposes a prosperous businessman with someone who is more sensitive but less successful. The entrepreneurial Victor is contrasted with a humbled Paul, whose struggles with alcohol have led him to lose faith in Victor’s libertarian philosophy of individual empowerment. Paul’s sense of his own vulnerability and weakness has led him to depend on the AA system of support, which allows him to survive, albeit in a wounded, broken condition. Like //Skylight//, this play uses a highly charged personal situation and weds it to a substructure that is symbolic and abstract. The larger issues in this case concern the fall of communism, the rise of the Internet, and the adoption of a “new economy” moral philosophy associated once again with the Thatcher revolution. This ability to take the lives and feelings of specifically realized contemporary characters and to brilliantly indicate their relationship to larger social, political, or philosophical themes continues to make Hare one of Britain’s most important playwrights. Brown, John R., ed. //Modern British Dramatists: New Perspectives//. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1984. An attempt to put the dramatist in the historical context of postwar theater. Chambers, Colin, and Mike Prior. //Playwrights’ Progress: Patterns of Postwar British Drama//. Oxford, England: Amber Lane Press, 1987. Offers a critical look at David Hare and characterizes his social criticism as somewhat out-of-date. Dean, Joan Fitzgerald. //David Hare//. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Survey of Hare’s work up to //The Secret Rapture//, including films and plays for television. Provides background information about British political and social concerns as the context for Hare’s work for the benefit of American readers, and tracks the expanding scope of Hare’s plays. Includes a chronology and extensive bibliography. Donesky, Finlay. //David Hare: Moral and Historical Perspectives//. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Often contentious survey places Hare’s plays in the social context of England and demonstrates how his characters move from identification with a moral consensus developed during World War II to a concern with spiritual issues during the ascendancy of Prime Minister Thatcher. Praises Hare for his sensitivity to the personal dimension and his ability to dramatize simultaneously a specific and universal moral perspective but is inclined to debunk Hare’s reputation as a spokesperson for left-wing political dissent. Hayman, Ronald. //British Theatre Since 1955: A Reassessment//. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Hayman covers Hare’s early career; the influence of Raymond Williams, the Marxist don under whom Hare studied at Jesus College; the Portable Theatre; the Royal Court; and a number of plays, from //Teeth ‘n’ Smiles// to //Plenty//. An appendix surveys the plays produced year by year from 1955 to 1978. Chapter 3, “The Politics of Hatred,” concentrates on Hare’s work. Homden, Carol. //The Plays of David Hare//. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. A consideration of Hare’s work from the 1970’s to the 1990’s trilogy. Rejecting a strictly linear chronological approach, the plays and screenplays are discussed in overlapping strands, with particular attention to key themes in Hare’s work, particularly his relationship with both the political left and the political right, and to the development of a “theatre of juxtaposition.” Bibliography10 Oliva, Judy Lee. //David Hare: Theatricalizing Politics//. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1990. Includes textual analyses of more than twenty plays, television scripts, and feature films, addressing both literary and performance issues. Chapters are divided into “Individual Concerns,” “National Concerns,” and “International Concerns,” with special attention to how the plays’ components produce Hare’s perspective on social and political issues. Illustrated with photographs from productions directed by Hare, this study also includes a 1989 interview with the playwright. Pattie, David. “The Common Good: The Hare Trilogy.” //Modern Drama// 42, no. 3 (1999): 363-374. An analysis of Hare’s trilogy, //Racing Demon//, //Murmuring Judges//, and //The Absence of War//, concluding that Hare’s depiction of the effects of Thatcherite policies on British institutions are not adequately accounted for. Zeifman, Hersh, ed. //David Hare: A Casebook//. Reprint. New York: Garland, 2001. A collection of essays by theater scholars largely on specific plays, plus an interview with Hare conducted in 1991. Topics discussed include the role of women in Hare’s plays, relationship between his films and his work in theater, and the language of Hare’s drama. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution or information storage retrieval systems without the written permission of the publisher. For complete copyright information, please see the online version of this work: http://www.enotes.com/david-hare-salem
 * David Hare**
 * Other Literary Forms**
 * Achievements**
 * Analysis**
 * Bibliography**

David Auburn (AW-burn) began to achieve critical and popular success toward the end of the twentieth century. Though his writing career started in Chicago, he began to establish himself on the East Coast in 1994, while he was a member of the Juilliard playwriting program. The son of an English professor and college administrator, he grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and Little Rock and Jonesboro, Arkansas. After high school, he attended the University of Chicago from 1987 to 1991. There he joined a student improvisation troupe, in which he experimented with short comedy sketches that would influence his writing style in the years to come. He also reviewed plays for the University of Chicago’s student newspaper, // The Chicago Maroon //, which gave him exposure to professional theater. After college, associates of Amblin Entertainment, the company of film producer Steven Spielberg, recognized his talent through a writing competition and offered him a screenwriting fellowship. After this experience in Los Angeles, he moved to New York City, where he joined another improvisation troupe called Atomic Pile before attending the Juilliard School from 1994 to 1996. Some of the shorter scripts he wrote in the 1990’s were produced in New York City, upstate New York, and Aspen, Colorado. Also, the // New England Review // and the Dramatists’ Play Service published much of his early work. These pieces, except for // Three Monologues //, engage the audience with humor and fast-paced narratives. Often, Auburn’s narratives are driven by a character’s awkward timing or false assumptions about other people. Shown best in // Damage Control // and// Miss You //, verbal and physical skirmishes ensue when certain characters voice their values, interests, and emotional problems at the most inopportune times. Time itself is the focus of at least two of Auburn’s plays, // What Do You Believe About the Future? // and // Skyscraper //. The latter, his first full-length play to be produced, takes place atop an old office building in Chicago that has been marked for demolition. The six characters in this play are drawn to the building out of a need to preserve it or to destroy it for personal, political, historical, or financial reasons. Though the play did give Auburn some recognition as a serious playwright, it did not run for very long Off-Broadway, and reviewers did not receive the play enthusiastically. However, // Skyscraper // was a personal success for Auburn, and his next play to appear Off-Broadway, // Proof //, became a public success that took his writing career to a new level. Auburn wrote // Proof // in the fall of 1998, while living in London with his wife, Frances Rosenfeld, a historian who was doing doctoral research there. The play, which opened Off-Broadway on May 23, 2000, takes place at the Chicago home of Catherine and her father, Robert. It begins shortly after the death of Robert, a famous mathematics professor at the University of Chicago who has battled a mental illness for the last ten years. Among other emotions related to loss, there are hints that the twenty-five-year-old Catherine feels a sense of relief at her father’s death, as she sacrificed college, among other things, to take care of him. However, Hal, Robert’s former student, seems inadvertently to prevent Catherine from emerging from the shadow of her father. Claire, Catherine’s sister, comes to take her back to New York, which threatens Catherine’s chance to live her own life for the first time; and Catherine is terrified by the idea that she may have inherited her father’s mental illness, which further complicates her internal struggle for independence. As an artistic, critical, and financial success, // Proof //played on Broadway, in London, and in several major cities of the United States. Two weeks before // Proof // opened on Broadway, Auburn won the Kesserling Prize for drama. Shortly after winning this award in 2000, he received a screenwriting deal with the film company Mirage Enterprises. Also in 2000, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He won the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 2001, and // Proof // received a Tony Award for best play in 2001. Early in 2001, the movie rights to // Proof // were purchased, and Auburn was hired to write the film adaptation. Along with writing screenplays, Auburn worked as script consultant for the musical // tic, tic, BOOM //, based on the original script by the late Jonathan Larsen, writer of the award-winning musical // Rent // (pr. 1996).
 * David Auburn**

Bibliography
Mesic, Penelope. “The New Math.” // Chicago // 51 (March, 2002): 40-43. Combines a discussion of // Proof // with some biography and insight into the character of its author. Rockmore, Daniel. “Uncertainty Is Certain in Mathematics and Life.” // The Chronicle of Higher Education // 46 (June 23, 2000): B9. Written by a mathematics professor, the article provides a perceptive look at the relationship between the idealism of math and the reality of life in // Proof //. Weber, Bruce. “A Common Heart and Uncommon Brain.” // The New York Times //, May 24, 2000, p. E1. A review of // Proof //, published the day after it opened.

**Proof** by David Auburn 1. Proof: Introduction 2. Proof: David Auburn Biography 3. Proof: Summary 4. Proof: Characters 5. Proof: Themes 6. Proof: Style 7. Proof: Historical Context 8. Proof: Critical Overview 9. Proof: Essays and Criticism ♦ Critical Essay on Proof ♦ The Uncertain Nature of Human Existence ♦ Proof Positive ♦ Or in the Heart or in the Head 10. Proof: Topics for Further Study 11. Proof: Media Adaptations 12. Proof: What Do I Read Next? 13. Proof: Bibliography and Further Reading 14. Proof: Pictures 15. Copyright **Proof: Introduction** //Proof// (2001), a play by David Auburn, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, as well as several other major awards for drama. The play is set in Chicago, where Robert, a former genius of a mathematician who suffered from mental illness, has recently died. Robert appears in the play talking with his daughter Catherine, a depressed college drop-out who stayed at home and cared for her father over the last few years of his life. As Proof1preparations are made for the funeral and Catherine’s sister Claire returns from New York, Catherine forms a tentative friendship with Hal, a mathematician who is one of her father’s former students. The plot moves into high gear when Hal discovers in one of the notebooks that Robert left behind a proof of a mathematical theorem that mathematicians had thought impossible. It is a sensational discovery, but Catherine stuns Hal by claiming she wrote the proof. But did she? The handwriting in the notebook looks very like her father’s. As the mystery develops and resolves, the playwright explores issues such as what the link may be between genius and madness and whether either or both can be inherited. But //Proof// is also a story about human relationships, suggesting that developing trust and love can be as difficult, and just as uncertain, as establishing the truth of a mathematical proof. David Auburn was born in Chicago in 1969. Raised in Ohio and Arkansas, he attended the University of Chicago where he studied political philosophy. At the time, Auburn did not know he wanted to be a writer, but he joined a student group that performed comedy sketches. Auburn started writing some of the sketches and found he had a talent for it. He then started to write longer pieces. After Auburn graduated in 1991, he won a writing fellowship offered by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Productions, and he moved to Los Angeles to learn the craft of screenwriting. When the fellowship ended, Auburn moved to New York where he wrote plays and had some of them performed in tiny theaters. During the day, Auburn worked as a copywriter for a chemical company. In 1994, Auburn was accepted into the playwriting program at Juillard, where he also studied acting. Auburn soon gave up acting to concentrate on playwriting. His work at Juillard led to his first major play, //Skyscraper// (1997). In this play, the lives of a group of people are changed as they discover their connections with each other during the demolition of a crumbling //Skyscraper// in Chicago. In 1998, the Dramatists’ Play Service published several of Auburn’s one-act plays under the title //Fifth Planet and Other Plays//. The title play charts the friendship between two observatory workers as it waxes and wanes over the course of a year. Other plays in the collection included //Are You Ready//? in which the fates of three people drawn to the same restaurant are altered in an instant; //Damage Control//, about a politician and his aide during a crisis; //Three Monologues//, depicting a young woman’s solitude; //We Had a Very Good Time//, in which a married couple travels to a dangerous foreign country, and //What Do You Believe about the Future//, in which ten characters answer the question posed by the play’s title. //Proof//, Auburn’s most successful play, premiered at the Manhattan Theatre Club in May 2000 and opened at Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theatre on October 24, 2000. The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2001, the Joseph Kesselring Prize, the Drama Desk Award, and the Tony Award for Best Play of 2001. Auburn has written a screenplay based on the play, and the film was in production as of 2004. Also in 2004, Auburn had his play //The Journals of Mihail Sebastian// debut at the Keen Company in New York on March 6. A one-man show, it is adapted from the writings of Mihail Sebastian, a Romanian novelist and playwright, whose journals recalling anti-Semitism in Romania during World War II were published in 1996. The expressionistic play covers six years in Sebastian’s life, with the journal being created over the course of the evening. //Proof// begins at one o’clock in the morning on the porch of a house in Chicago. Catherine sits in a chair, exhausted, and is startled when she realizes her father, Robert, is there. Robert gives her a bottle of champagne and wishes her happy birthday. He wants her to celebrate her birthday with friends, but she says Proof: Introduction2 she has none. Robert expresses concern about her, saying that she sleeps until noon, eats junk food, and does not work. He tells her to stop moping. She has potential and there is still time. It transpires that Robert did his best work by the time he was in his mid-twenties. After that, he became mentally ill. Catherine is worried that she will inherit the illness. It then transpires that Robert died a week before, of heart failure, and the funeral is the next day. Hal, a former student of Robert’s, enters. He has been working on Robert’s notebooks, but Catherine says there is nothing valuable in them. Hal invites her to hear him play in a rock band, but she is not interested. He speaks about how he admired her father, who helped him through a difficult period in his doctoral studies. This was four years ago, when Robert’s illness went into remission. Catherine, fearing that Hal may be taking one of her father’s notebooks from the house without permission, demands to see his backpack. She finds nothing there, but as he is about to leave, a notebook falls from his jacket pocket. She accuses him of stealing it and calls the police. He protests that in the notebook, Robert wrote something appreciative about Catherine on her birthday four years ago. Hal was going to wrap the notebook and give it to her. The next morning, Catherine and Claire, who has arrived from New York, are drinking coffee. Claire tries to be kind, but Catherine is not receptive. Claire quizzes Catherine about Hal and about why she called the police, but Catherine resents the questioning. Hal enters unexpectedly, and there is a moment of confusion as Catherine berates her sister. Hal quickly exits, leaving Claire saying that decisions must be made. She wants Catherine to stay with her in New York. That night, there is a party following the funeral. Catherine is on the porch when Hal, who has been playing in the band, approaches her. He compliments her on her dress and talks about how mathematicians consider they are past their peak after the age of twenty-three. He refers to them as men, but Catherine mentions Sophie Germain, an eighteenth-century Frenchwoman who did important work on prime numbers. Catherine apologizes for her behavior the day before, and Hal confides that he thinks his work in mathematics is trivial. They talk about how elegant Robert’s work was. Catherine then surprises Hal by kissing him. Hal reminds her of when they first met, four years ago, and they kiss again. Hal and Catherine have spent the night together, and the next morning she gives him a key to the bottom drawer of her father’s desk. Claire enters with a hangover. She tells Catherine that she would like her to move to New York. Catherine says she would prefer to stay in Chicago, but Claire replies that she has already sold the house. They quarrel. Catherine complains that Claire never helped to take care of their father; Claire replies that she worked fourteen-hour days so she could pay off the mortgage on the house. She says that Robert should have been sent to an institution, but Catherine disagrees. Hal returns with a notebook. Inside it, he says, is a proof of a theorem about prime numbers. If it checks out, it will show that when Robert was supposedly insane, he was doing some of the most important math work in the world. Catherine stuns him by saying that it was she who wrote it. It is a September afternoon four years earlier. Robert and Catherine talk on the porch. Catherine says she has enrolled as a math major at Northwestern. She tells him that since he has been well for nearly seven months, he does not need her there all the time. Robert is not happy about her decision and says she should have discussed it with him. Hal enters. At this time, he is Robert’s graduate student, and he brings a draft of his dissertation. Robert says he will look it over and tells Hal to come by his office in a week. Then, he realizes that it is Catherine’s birthday, and he had forgotten it. He is annoyed with himself, but Catherine tells him not to worry. They agree to go out to dinner. As Catherine goes out to dress, Robert begins writing in his Proof: Summary3 notebook. Catherine, Hal, and Claire discuss the newly discovered notebook. Catherine insists that she wrote the proof, working on it for years after she dropped out of school. Hal and Claire are skeptical. Claire thinks the proof is written in her father’s handwriting. She suggests that Catherine talk them through it to convince them, but Hal says that would not prove anything, since her father might have written it and explained it to Catherine later. Catherine is unhappy that they do not believe her. She says she trusted Hal and wanted him to be the first person to see the proof. He still cannot believe that she wrote it, since to do so she would have to have been as good as her father. After Catherine snaps at him, he exits. Catherine and Claire struggle over the notebook and Catherine throws it to the floor. The next day, Claire berates Hal for taking advantage of Catherine and sleeping with her. She refuses to let Hal talk to her, but she does let him take the notebook. She tells Hal to figure out what is in there and advise the family about what to do. It is winter, three and a half years earlier. Robert is on the porch in the cold, writing in a notebook. When Catherine, who is a student at Northwestern, arrives, he tells her that he is working again. He feels he has regained all his intellectual brilliance and is excited about what he will be able to produce. He wants her to collaborate with him and hands her his notebook, which Catherine reads slowly. It is confused, rambling nonsense. She puts her arm around him and takes him inside the house. Back in the present, Claire and Catherine prepare to leave for New York. At first, they appear to be getting on well, but when Claire tells her how much she will love New York, Catherine gives sarcastic replies, and the two women quarrel. Claire exits, upset. Hal enters. He is excited. The proof has checked out. Catherine is not surprised and tells him to publish it. He now believes that it is her work because it uses new mathematical techniques that he thinks Robert would not have known. He wants Catherine to talk about her work so he can understand it better. Catherine is upset that he did not trust her in the first place. He hands her the book. She says that doing the proof was just a matter of connecting the dots. Her father knew nothing of her work. Hal asks her to go through it with him, and she picks up the book, finds a section, looks at him, and begins speaking. Catherine is Robert’s twenty-five-year-old daughter. A college dropout, she has spent several years at home caring for her mentally ill father. A few years earlier, when his illness went into remission for almost a year, she enrolled as a sophomore at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She dropped out of that program and returned to look after her father when he again became ill. Their relationship, although sometimes antagonistic on the surface, was sustained by strong mutual affection. Catherine is worried that she may inherit her father’s illness, and the signs of mental instability are already there. Although she is a highly intelligent woman, she has no direction in life and often, according to her father, sleeps till noon. Some days she does not even get out of bed. She is obviously suffering from depression, and her attitude about life is bitter. Claire, her sister, wants her to move to New York so she can keep an eye on her and arrange for the best medical treatment, but Catherine resents her interference. Evidence of her unstable mental condition emerges in Claire’s report of her aggressive behavior toward the Proof: Characters4 police officers who came to the house after Catherine reported a burglary in progress (which was her extreme reaction to Hal’s attempt to smuggle out one of her father’s notebooks). Hal attempts to befriend Catherine. She then takes the lead and seduces him. Wanting to show affection and trust, she allows him to discover the amazing mathematical proof that she has written in one of her father’s notebooks. She is upset when Hal does not believe she wrote it and feels that her trust in him has been betrayed. Eventually, Hal is convinced that she wrote the proof, and the mathematical genius that Catherine inherited from her father is finally revealed and acknowledged. It appears that Catherine and Hal may be on their way to a rewarding relationship, both professionally and personally. Claire is Catherine’s efficient, practical, and successful sister. Unlike Catherine, she has inherited none of her father’s erratic genius. Instead, she has made a career in New York as a currency analyst. She made enough money to pay off the mortgage on the family home in Chicago, even when she was living in a studio apartment in Brooklyn, New York. Claire lives with her boyfriend, Mitch, who also has a successful career, and they plan to marry in January. Claire and Catherine have never gotten along well, and when Claire returns from New York for their father’s funeral, they quarrel. Claire feels responsible for Catherine’s welfare and wants her to move to New York, but Catherine resents what she sees as Claire’s interference in her life. It transpires that they have quarreled in the past over how to care for their father. Claire thought he should be sent to an institution, but Catherine believed it was important for him to remain near the university. Claire has little understanding of Catherine and regards her as mentally ill, but she means well and takes her family responsibilities seriously. Hal, whose full name is Harold Dobbs, is a twenty-eight-year-old mathematician who teaches at the University of Chicago. He also plays drums in a rock band made up of mathematicians. Hal is a former student of Robert’s, whom he admires immensely, not only for the brilliance of his achievements in mathematics but because Robert helped him through a bad patch in his doctoral studies. Hal first met Catherine briefly four years earlier, and when he meets her again, he tries to make friends with her. He seems rather shy and inexperienced with women, and it is she who seduces him rather than the other way round. After they spend the night together, he is ready to fall in love with her. Hal also confides in Catherine that he is dissatisfied with the progress of his career. His academic papers are being rejected by journals, and he feels that his work is trivial. Although he does not openly acknowledge it, this is one of the underlying reasons that he is examining Robert’s notebooks. If he can discover something important, it will boost his career and perhaps make a name for himself. He is thrilled when he finds the proof in Robert’s notebook and takes some convincing by Catherine that it is her work. This harms their relationship, since Catherine is annoyed that he does not believe her. When Hal is convinced, he reacts with humility rather than jealousy. He tries to repair their relationship and asks Catherine to go over the proof with him so he can ask questions and understand it better. Robert was a famous mathematician who has just died of a heart attack in his fifties. He is already dead when the play begins, but he appears in the first scene in Catherine’s imagination and returns in two later scenes, which flash back to earlier years. Robert was a mathematical genius. When he was in his early twenties, he made major contributions to game theory, algebraic geometry, and nonlinear operator theory. According to Hal, his former graduate student, he invented the mathematical techniques for studying rational behavior. While he was still in his twenties, Robert was afflicted by a serious mental illness, which dogged the remainder of his life. He became so incapacitated that his daughter Catherine had to stay at home to care for him. Robert had a deep affection for Catherine. He realized the sacrifices she made in caring for him, and he believed that she saved his life. Robert was also worried that she appeared to be wasting her life. Four years before his death, Robert’s illness went into remission, and he was able to teach again for one academic year. Proof: Characters5 During that year, Robert thought he was back at his best and would once more be able to do exciting, pioneering work in mathematics. He even asked Catherine if she would collaborate with him, but she soon found out that his notebooks were full of nonsense; his mind was confused, and he was lapsing into insanity. Robert and Catherine, the two mathematical geniuses, are brilliant but mentally unstable, and they are contrasted with the other two characters, Hal and Claire, who lack the genius of the other two but are better adjusted to the world. Robert revolutionized the field of mathematics when he was in his early twenties, but he has waged a long battle with mental illness. The implication is that the illness is somehow connected with his genius. Another implication, in addition to the fact that genius, at least in this case, appears to be inherited, is that insanity may be inherited too. Catherine worries about this possibility, and although Robert tries to reassure her that it is not the case, she too shows signs of mental instability. She is too depressed to function effectively, and her life is not moving in a positive direction. She is bitter and finds it hard to trust the good intentions of others. And yet she is as brilliant as her father. Genius is therefore presented as a fragile thing; it can produce great intellectual achievements but may be inimical to personal happiness and stability. There is a price to pay for being an extraordinary individual. The genius of Robert and Catherine is contrasted to the more pedestrian figures of Hal and Claire. Hal is a hard worker, a competent mathematician, and probably a good teacher, but he lacks the spark of genius. His work, as he says himself, is trivial. The big ideas elude him, and always will. This is why he combs through Robert’s notebooks, hoping that some spark of genius will fly out from the pages, enabling him to bask in reflected glory. Claire too is competent and practical, ‘‘very quick with numbers,’’ and this has enabled her to have a successful career as a currency analyst. But making money in the big city is a far cry from genius, which Claire acknowledges in her father but does not understand. She is too well adjusted to the world to have any interest in the beauty of abstractions. Thus through the four characters the play contrasts the mundane and the ordinary, on which the day-to-day world turns, with the exceptional and the extraordinary, which is the rare stuff of genius that creates the peaks of human achievements. The certainty of a mathematical proof, which can be followed logically and established as absolutely true beyond any doubt, is a sharp contrast to the fragility and uncertainty of human life and relationships. Unlike in mathematics, truth in life is a harder thing to understand and grasp. Much of it, the play suggests, depends on trust. Catherine and Robert trust each other, and Robert believes that his daughter’s love for him saved his life. There is never any doubt of the strength of the bond between father and daughter. But the other central relationship in the play, that between Catherine and Hall, is more problematic. It develops tentatively, and issues of trust soon surface. The truth is hard to determine. Catherine is suspicious of Hal’s motives in going through Robert’s notebooks, thinking that he may want to publish some of her father’s work under his own name. Hal vigorously denies this, but she does not believe him, and perhaps Hal may not be willing to acknowledge even to himself that his motivation may not be entirely disinterested. He knows, after all, that his career has stalled, and a major discovery such as he seeks might give it a boost. The relationship between Hal and Catherine moves in an awkward dance of mistrust followed by attempts at trust. In act 1, scene 1, Catherine thinks he is stealing a notebook, and he is, but not for the purpose she thinks. In act 1, scene 4, she tries to show her regained trust when she gives him the key to the drawer which contains Proof: Themes6 her proof. But then when she claims the proof is hers, the tables are turned; it is now Hal who mistrusts Catherine, refusing to believe that she is capable of such work of genius. In turn, she once more becomes suspicious of him, saying the reason he wants to take the proof is to show off to his colleagues: ‘‘You can’t wait to show them your brilliant discovery,’’ she says. Mistrust again fills the air, on both sides. The proof that sits harmlessly in the notebook may embody a beautiful, irrefutable truth, but for the people arguing over it, such truth is elusive, not only about who wrote the proof, but also in terms of the truthfulness of their relationship. The uncertainty continues into the final scene. Hal has overcome his doubts about whether Catherine wrote the proof, but she is still dealing with the hurt feelings that arose because he did not trust her word at first. She now plays devil’s advocate and makes a telling comment that plays on the contrast between mathematical certainty and the uncertain, ambiguous world of human activities and relations. Even though Hal has carefully elaborated his reasons for concluding that the work is hers, she says that none of the arguments he has produced prove anything. ‘‘You should have trusted me,’’ she says. It seems that trust is the only way that certainty can be established in this uncertain world; it is the only thing that can guide people through the complexity of human relationships, although the play leaves no doubt about how easy it is to undermine trust and how hard it is to maintain it. To Hal’s credit, he does not try to argue with Catherine. Like a fine mathematical proof (‘‘streamlined, no wasted moves,’’ as Hal says of Robert’s work), he takes the surest way to the goal, acknowledging that she is correct: he should have trusted her. It is on that basis of trust that he and Catherine can go forward together. The exposition of a play is the introductory material, which creates the tone, introduces the characters, perhaps suggests the theme, and gives the background information necessary in order to understand the play. In this play, the exposition is done with great economy and skill. So much is accomplished in the first eight pages of the script, amounting to less than half of the first scene, in which Robert and Catherine talk to each other. In this short time, the audience learns that there is affection as well as frustration between father and daughter; that Robert is a mathematician and a genius who did his best work while he was in his twenties and who is now mentally ill; that Catherine is depressed, has no friends, and does not like her sister; that she has some mathematical knowledge and can banter with her father about mathematical concepts; that she is worried about inheriting his illness. All this is accomplished within a couple hundred mostly short lines of dialogue. The playwright shows that he is a master of the theatrical surprise, a moment when something is revealed that the audience up to that point had not known or guessed. Halfway through the first scene, for example, Robert says that the only reason he can admit that he is crazy is because he is also dead. This is a startling moment and also a surprisingly humorous one (the intensity and sadness of the play is offset many times by humor). Another aspect of this strategy of surprise is the fact that in a number of scenes, a new piece of information is produced near the end to give a twist to the interactions of the characters. This occurs for example at the end of the first scene, when Hal reveals the real reason he tried to sneak out with the notebook. It also occurs in act 1, scene 3, when Hal reveals that he and Catherine have met before. The most stunning use of this technique occurs at the end of act 1, when Catherine claims that she is the author of the proof. Sophie Germain, the French mathematician so admired by Catherine in //Proof//, was born into a middle-class Proof: Style7 family in Paris in 1776. She first became interested in mathematics when she was thirteen. Confined to her home because the French Revolution had broken out, she taught herself mathematics in her father’s library. Her family tried to discourage her, considering that mathematics was not an appropriate field of study for a girl. But Sophie persisted. She obtained lecture notes from the École Polytechnique, an academy founded in 1794 that trained mathematicians and scientists but refused to enroll women. Becoming interested in the work of J. L. Lagrange, she submitted a paper to him under the pseudonym Antoine-August Le Blanc, a man who was a former student at the academy. Lagrange was impressed by the paper and wanted to meet the author. Overcoming his surprise at discovering a young female mathematician, he agreed to become her mentor. This gave Germain entry into the circle of mathematicians and scientists that had up to then been closed to her. In 1804, Germain began corresponding with the German mathematician, Carl Friedrich Gauss (as Catherine tells Hal in //Proof//), one of the most brilliant mathematicians of all time. Germain shared with him her work in number theory. It was three years before Gauss discovered that the bright young correspondent whom he had been mentoring was a woman. A dozen years later, Germain wrote to the mathematician Legendre, presenting the work in number theory that was to become her greatest contribution to mathematics. In 1816, Germain was awarded a prize by the French Academy of Sciences for her work in explaining mathematically the vibration of elastic surfaces. That Germain continued work in this area was another of her lasting contributions to mathematical theory. Germain died in 1831, before she could accept an honorary degree from the University of Göttingen that Gauss had convinced the university to award. Germain’s contribution to mathematics was all the more remarkable because, like Catherine in //Proof//, she lacked formal academic training. When //Proof// was first produced in 2000, it was the latest in a number of plays that took their inspiration from intellectual disciplines such as mathematics and physics. The aim of the playwrights seemed to be to give the audience some substantial food for thought as well as an evening’s entertainment. The fashion began with British playwright Tom Stoppard. Stoppard’s //Hapgood// (1988; revised 1994) used the intricacies and paradoxes of quantum physics as metaphors for the world of espionage during the cold war. In 1994, Stoppard wrote Arcadia, another play in which the audience found themselves immersed in quantum physics, as well as chaos theory. Like //Proof//, //Arcadia// features a young woman with an extraordinary grasp of mathematical theory. Also like //Proof//, it alludes to a nineteenth-century woman who made an impact on mathematical theory. This was not Sophie Germain but Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, who worked with mathematician Charles Babbage in developing the theory of a new calculating machine. The mathematical plan she wrote is now considered to be the first computer program. Other plays which drew on quantum physics included Michael Frayn’s //Copenhagen// (2000), a sophisticated investigation of a meeting between physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in 1941, and Hypatia by Mac Wellman, which was based on the life and death of //Hypatia//, a fifthcentury mathematician and philosopher. According to Bruce Weber, whose New York Times article, ‘‘Science Finding a Home Onstage,’’ is about the contemporary fashion of writing plays with scientific content: This flowering use of science as narrative material and scientific concepts as metaphors for the stage. .. . provides evidence that science is re-entering the realm of popular culture, not just in imaginative, futuristic fiction but also in other mainstream and alternative forms: from historical reconstruction and theoretical abstraction to fluffy romance and contemporary realism. Proof: Historical Context8 As might be expected of a Pulitzer prize-winning play, //Proof// was received enthusiastically by audiences and most reviewers. The stunning revelation at the end of act 1, when Catherine announces that it was she, not her father, who wrote the proof, was regularly greeted with gasps by the audience. Bruce Weber, in the //New York Times//, called //Proof// ‘‘an exhilarating and assured new play. . . that turns the esoteric world of higher mathematics literally into a back porch drama, one that is as accessible and compelling as a detective story.’’ Weber admired the pacing of the play, and further noted that it ‘‘presents mathematicians as both blessed and bedeviled by the gift for abstraction that ties them achingly to one another and separates them, also achingly, from concrete-minded folks like you and me.’’ Weber also appreciated the spirit of the play in which there was no meanness; the characters struggling to deal with the devastating effects of mental illness were all ‘‘good people.’’ Weber reported again on the play over a year later, noting in the //New York Times// that it was still playing to sold-out houses at the Walter Kerr Theatre. A change of cast had not diminished its appeal, but rather shown that the characters and their relationships could be given ‘‘new and distinct emotional shadings.’’ In //Variety//, Robert Hoffler wrote of the play’s ‘‘rich, aching melancholia’’ and praised its ambitious structure and its sense of humor: ‘‘The mercurial nature of the mathematician’s art is refracted everywhere, usually in ways that offer a humorous counterpoint to somber loss.’’ In //Library Journal//, Robert W. Melton was equally enthusiastic, describing //Proof// as a ‘‘wonderful’’ play: ‘‘[its] deft dialog, its careful structure, and the humanity of the central characters are themselves proof of a major new talent in the American theater.’’ One dissenting voice was that of Robert Brustein, in //The New Republic//, who complained that although the playwright had a competent grasp of his material, the plot was too thin. The author ‘‘runs out of material so quickly that, by the middle of the second act, the play jerks to a halt and starts running in place.’’ In researching //Proof//, Auburn consulted with a number of mathematicians and also read the biographies of prominent mathematicians, aspects of whose lives find their way into the play. When Hal tells Catherine that some of the older mathematicians he encounters at conferences are addicted to amphetamines, which they take to make their minds feel sharp, he is amplifying the well-known story of mathematician Paul Erdös who began taking amphetamines so he could keep up the fast pace of his mathematical work. When friends persuaded him to stop taking the amphetimines for a month, Erdös complained that he had not been able to do any creative work during that time and promptly resumed taking the drugs. Andrew Wiles is another mathematician whose story finds an echo in //Proof//. Wiles, a professor of mathematics at Princeton University, worked for many years to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem when the conventional wisdom was that such a proof was impossible. In 1993, Wiles announced at a conference that he had proved the theorem. It transpired that he had been working on it in solitude, in an office in his attic, for seven years, telling no one of what he was doing. This surely inspired the picture Drawing of a geometric calculation by presented in //Proof// of Catherine, who also works in solitude and in secret, and then suddenly, out of the blue, unveils a ground-breaking mathematical proof. But the mathematician whose life story is most closely linked to //Proof// is John Forbes Nash, Jr, who is the subject of //A Beautiful Mind// (1998), a biography by Sylvia Nasar which was made into a popular movie in 2001. Nash was a mathematical genius. In 1949, when he was twenty-one years old and a graduate student at Princeton University, he wrote a slim, twenty-seven-page doctoral thesis on game theory (a theory of how Proof: Critical Overview9 people behave when they expect their actions to influence the behavior of others) that revolutionized the field of economics. Nash became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when he was only twentythree and quickly went on to solve a series of mathematical problems that other mathematicians had deemed impossible. He seemed destined to become one of the greatest mathematicians in the history of the discipline. Then, in 1959, when Nash was thirty years old, his behavior, which had always been eccentric, became bizarre and irrational. He heard strange voices and became obsessed with the idea of world government. He accused a colleague of entering his office to steal his ideas. He turned down the offer of a chair at the University of Chicago with the explanation that he was going to become Emperor of Antarctica. Nash was admitted to McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, where he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder that distorts thinking and perception. It leads to a loss of contact with reality and bizarre, sometimes antisocial behavior as the sufferer withdraws into his own inner world. Schizophrenia is difficult to treat and there is no cure. Nash spent the next thirty years afflicted with the disease, which would occasionally go into temporary partial remission before returning. His career was destroyed although he made a surprise recovery during the 1990s. He resumed living a normal life and studying mathematics and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1994. The parallels between the real life of Nash and the fictional life of Robert in //Proof// are many, and they prompt questions of whether genius and insanity are linked and whether both are inherited. Robert is clearly a Nash-like figure. Hal reminds Catherine in act 1, scene 1 that when Robert was in his early twenties he had made major contributions to three fields: game theory, algebraic geometry, and nonlinear operator theory. These are exactly the same fields, according to Nasar, in which the young Nash made his impact. Nasar also points out that in the early days of his illness, Nash seemed to have a heightened awareness of life: He began to believe that a great many things he saw— a telephone number, a red necktie, a dog trotting along the sidewalk, a Hebrew letter, a sentence in the //New York Times//—had a hidden significance, apparent only to him. . . . He believed he was on the brink of cosmic insights. This is echoed by Robert, as he recalls his mental state soon after he became ill. He tells Catherine about the clarity with which he saw things, and he believed that his mind was even sharper than before: If I wanted to look for information—secrets, complex and tantalizing messages—I could find them all around me. In the air. In a pile of fallen leaves some neighbor raked together. In box scores in the paper, written in the steam coming up off a cup of coffee. The whole world was talking to me. Although the play does not mention the exact nature of Robert’s illness, the hallucinations and delusions he suffered from make it clear that he, like the real-life Nash, was schizophrenic. Robert was no doubt mistaken when he claimed that his mind had become sharper, because during his illness his mental processes no longer bore any relation to reality. As with Nash, the insights he thought he had contained meanings known only to him and were useless for objectively verifiable mathematical knowledge. Just as Nash believed that powers from outer space, or foreign governments, were communicating with him through cryptic messages in the //New York Times// that only he could decode, so too Robert used to borrow large numbers of books from libraries because he thought that aliens were sending him messages through the Dewey decimal numbers on the books, and he was trying to work out the code. Was Nash’s insanity, or that of Robert in //Proof//, somehow related to their genius? The idea that creativity and madness are linked is an old one. Plato wrote in his dialog Ion that the poet was inspired with a kind of divine mania, and cultural history turns up many examples of exceptionally creative people who have been afflicted Critical Essay on Proof10 with mental illness of one kind or another, including the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the artist Vincent van Gogh, and the writer Virginia Woolf. In more modern times, American poets Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell suffered from mental illness. (In 1959, Lowell was a patient at McLean Hospital in Belmont when Nash was admitted.) The most common type of mental illness amongst creative artists is manic-depression, also known as bipolar disorder. This is not the same as schizophrenia. Although manic-depression can produce delusions, it is mainly characterized by extreme mood swings, ranging from great elation to deep depression. Research suggests that creative artists, poets in particular, are two to three times more likely to suffer from manic-depression than scientists. For the poet or writer, it is possible that manic-depression can enhance creativity, since the mood swings may offer more acute insight into the peaks and troughs of human experience, which in turn can lend the artist’s work a profundity that might escape those who live on a more even emotional keel. Creative people who suffer from manic depression are often able to function quite normally between episodes, which is usually not the case with schizophrenia. It would seem that schizophrenia, far from being somehow linked with creativity, is in fact inimical to it, since the feeling of heightened awareness it may produce translates only into delusional perceptions, not deeper insights into truth. Although there does seem to be a certain unusual quality to the minds and personalities of many great scientists and philosophers, madness does not describe it. Nasar points out many examples of men of genius, including Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittenstein, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein, who had emotionally detached, eccentric, solitary, inward-looking personalities that may have been useful in promoting the kind of creativity that these disciplines require. Such people—Nash was one of them before his illness—are able to think not only more profoundly but also in different ways than less gifted individuals. Nash was used to solving problems in ways that had not occurred to others. He developed this habit of thinking ‘‘out of the box’’ at an early age. His sister reported that Nash’s mother was once told that her son, then in elementary school, was having trouble with math, because he could see ways of solving mathematical problems that were different from the methods the teachers were used to. When Nash was a mature mathematician, his mind not only worked faster than anyone else’s, he continued to approach mathematical problems in unusual ways that would unlock new possibilities that astonished his colleagues. Nasar reports that Donald Newman, a mathematician who knew Nash at MIT in the 1950s, said of him that ‘‘everyone else would climb a peak by looking for a path somewhere on the mountain. Nash would climb another mountain altogether and from that distant peak would shine a searchlight back onto the first peak.’’ Sometimes when Nash presented his unexpected results to professional audiences, there would be some who said they could not possibly believe them, so novel was Nash’s approach to the problem. Auburn clearly incorporated this dimension of Nash’s mind into the character of Robert in //Proof//. When Hal says to Catherine that hard work was not the secret of Robert’s success, she contradicts him but immediately explains that the work went on almost unseen, and Robert’s success resulted from his taking an unusual starting point: He’d attack a question from the side, from some weird angle, sneak up on it, grind away at it. He was slogging. He was just so much faster than anyone else that from the outside it looked magical. Hal’s immediate response, about the beauty and the elegance of Robert’s work, also corresponds to what mathematicians said about Nash’s work. It is quite common for mathematics to be described in this way, as if it somehow partakes in the essential beauty and order of the universe. The French mathematician Henri Poincaré wrote about the aesthetic feeling known by all mathematicians when they recognized these qualities revealed in their work, describing it as ‘‘the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance.’’ Critical Essay on Proof11 A final aspect of Nash’s life finds its way into //Proof// in Catherine’s worries that she may inherit her father’s illness, even though the depression she suffers from is not related to the symptoms of schizophrenia. Catherine is right to be concerned, since expert opinion considers that although the cause of schizophrenia is unknown, there is a genetic factor in the disease. It can be inherited and, indeed, Nash’s own son, John Charles Nash, was diagnosed, like his father, as a paranoid schizophrenic. Like his father also, John Charles Nash was a mathematician, brilliant but without his father’s spark of genius. Unlike schizophrenia, genius is not transmitted through genes, and there are numerous examples of geniuses whose offspring have been distinguished only by their mediocrity. So for Catherine in //Proof// to inherit both Robert’s genius and his mental illness would be a very unlikely event in real life, although of course, as //Proof// shows, it can be turned into excellent drama. Nash himself discovered this when at the age of seventy-three his biographer, Nasar, took him to see a performance of the play. An article in the Los Angeles Times by John Clark contains Nasar’s description of how Nash reacted: ’He loved it,’ says Nasar, who admits she was a little nervous about his response. ‘It was so much fun to see him laugh and react to //Proof// because [the father] is clearly inspired by Nash’s story, and to witness John Nash seeing this on the stage in front him—it was adorable.’ Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on //Proof//, in //Drama for Students//, Thomson Gale, 2005. **The Uncertain Nature of Human Existence** In his Puliter Prize–winning play //Proof//, Auburn brings into high relief the uncertain nature of life by contrasting it with the world of mathematics, where the truth or falsity of an idea can be proved with absolute certainty. In the world of numbers, two plus two always equals four; there is no doubt involved. But in matters of flesh and blood, especially in the way people relate to the world around them, there is no formula for absolute knowledge. The tenuous nature of reality as perceived through human eyes is vividly depicted in the play’s very first scene. Catherine, the troubled daughter of Robert, a brilliant mathematician of world renown, is having a revealing conversation with her father early in the morning of her twenty-fifth birthday. During the conversation, it is revealed that Robert suffers from mental illness. By its very nature, mental illness radically distorts a person’s perceptions of the world. It is also the nature of such an illness that the person afflicted with it is deluded into thinking that his perceptions are completely grounded in reality. As Robert tells Catherine, ‘‘Crazy people don’t sit around wondering if they’re nuts.’’ As their conversation continues, he reinforces the point by saying, ‘‘Take it from me. A very good sign that you’re crazy is an inability to ask the question, ‘Am I crazy?’’’ Robert is, in fact, an expert on the subject. After displaying mathematical genius in his early twenties, his career had been cut short by a debilitating mental illness. This is a man who, after rocking the math world with his proofs, began attempting to decipher the Dewey decimal codes of library books because he was convinced that they held hidden secret messages. Consequently, Catherine is wary of accepting the insights of a certified crazy person. It is not until midway through this first scene that the audience discovers that Richard is actually dead and that the action playing out in front of them is only a figment of Catherine’s imagination, calling into question her sanity. As a result, from the outset, the audience itself is forced to ask the question: What is true and what is not—and how do you prove the conclusions arrived at? This theme is carried throughout the play as Auburn compels the audience to keep wondering what the truth is. There is a particularly poignant scene near the end of act 2 when Robert makes another appearance, this time in a flashback. After suffering through years of mental illness, he has experienced months of clarity. His The Uncertain Nature of Human Existence12 recovery has been so significant that Catherine, who had given up pursuit of her own career in mathematics in order to care for him, was able to return to school. She pays a visit to her dad and finds him sitting outside in the freezing cold, working. He tells her that his ‘‘machinery,’’ meaning his brain, is once again firing on all cylinders. He is exhilarated to the point of being overheated and has gone out into the December day in order to cool off. Trying to describe for his incredulous daughter the incredible feeling that he is experiencing, Robert tells her that it is not as if a light has suddenly turned on in his mind, but rather the whole ‘‘power grid’’ that has been activated after years of dormancy. ‘‘I’m back!’ he tells her. ‘‘I’m back in touch with the source—the font, the— whatever the source of my creativity was all those years ago. I’m in contact with it again.’’ She reads what he has been scribbling in his notebook and in an instant it becomes painfully clear that what has returned is not the spark of genius but insanity. The play’s most significant questions are raised about Catherine, who is the main focus of uncertainty. Has she inherited her father’s genius? Does she suffer from the same mental illness that afflicted him? Have both the incandescent brilliance and the dark demons been passed from father to daughter? Again, unlike the world of mathematics, the answers to those questions are anything but clear-cut. It is part of Auburn’s genius that he constructed a play guaranteed to hold the audience’s interest by inserting the compelling elements of a mystery into what is, at its heart, the story of complex human relations. In an interview with Mel Gussow of the //New York Times//, Auburn notes that the genesis of this play can be traced to two ideas. One involved writing about two sisters ‘‘quarreling over the legacy of something left behind by their father.’’ The other had to do with someone whose parent suffered from mental illness and began to wonder whether she, too, might be starting to succumb to madness. To pull the audience along, Auburn tells Gussow that he wanted to use what Alfred Hitchcock referred to as a ‘‘Maguffin,’’ or plot device involving an object of mysterious origin. In this case, Auburn chose to insert the discovery of a mathematical proof into the story. That proof, whose existence is revealed at the end of act 1, provokes two essential questions: Is it indeed a brilliant breakthrough and, if so, who produced it—Robert or, as she herself claims, Catherine? The character asking those questions is Hal, a former student of Robert’s who has gone on to become a mathematics professor. He also has had a romantic eye on Catherine for many years. The question of the proof’s validity is relatively easy to solve. Writing about this play in //The Chronicle of Higher Education//, David Rockmore explains that this is fundamental to the concept of a proof. ‘‘Assuming that a person knows the language and has the background,’’ writes Rockmore, ‘‘anyone could, in theory, check all of the steps and decide on the correctness of a proof, and any two persons would make the same judgment.’’ Determining whether Catherine is the source of this brilliant piece of work, or is instead merely suffering from the same sort of insane delusions that afflicted her father, is a much more difficult task. As Rockmore, a professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College, observes, ‘‘In statements about life, proofs of similarly absolute certainty are difficult, if not impossible, to derive.’’ Consequently, Auburn does not wrap his play up into a neat and tidy package. In that sense, it mirrors life. As the play approaches the final curtain, Hal comes to believe that it was indeed Catherine who produced the proof. It is Catherine herself who keeps the mystery alive, telling Hal: You think you’ve figured something out? You run over here so pleased with yourself because you changed your mind. Now you’re certain. You’re so. . . //sloppy//. You don’t know anything. The book, the math, the dates, the writing, all that stuff you decided with your buddies, it’s just evidence. It doesn’t finish the job. It doesn’t prove anything. That is the way life is. Very few things are completely provable beyond a shadow of doubt. But absent proof, there is always possibility. And so, it is entirely appropriate that this play ends on an optimistic note. There is the promise that Catherine is indeed every bit as brilliant a mathematician as her father. There is also the very real possibility that she will not be overtaken by madness and will instead be able to keep a firm grasp on reality. As the curtain falls with her and Hal sitting side by side, there is no proof positive that the two will The Uncertain Nature of Human Existence13 find happiness and build a life together. There is, however, hope. Source: Curt Guyette, Critical Essay on //Proof//, in //Drama for Students//, Thomson Gale, 2005. Manhattan theater club does it again! David Auburn’s //Proof// is what //Copenhagen// ought to be: a play about scientists whose science matters less than their humanity. Here, those of us who want their dramatic characters to be real people need not feel excluded. Robert, a world-famous mathematician who went crazy; Catherine, his mathematically brilliant but too-depressed-to-work daughter; Hal, a young math teacher going through Robert’s hundred-plus confused notebooks: and Claire, Robert’s older daughter and a successful actuary, are above all fascinating individuals. Robert isn’t any less human even for being, through most of the play, dead. All four—whether loving, hating, encouraging or impeding one another—are intensely alive, complex, funny, human. The very first scene in //Proof// is masterly: a birthday dialogue between father and daughter, in which Catherine, alive, is barely living, and her celebrated father is sparklingly trying to rouse her into action although he is (I hate to give it away but must) dead—Catherine’s fantasy. Yet this mysterious, droll, and electrifying scene is really exposition in disguise: something generally a bore, but here so splendidly reconceived as to fascinate—as indeed all of //Proof// does. So here we have Robert, the near-genius mathematician who went mad and eventually died, and Catherine, who gave up a potentially great mathematical career to look after him and, in the process, let herself run down, perhaps irreversibly. Here, too, is Claire, the narrowly practical daughter, who wants to save Catherine from what may be incipient madness by dragging her from Chicago to New York and supervising her life—benignly as she sees it, but horribly as Catherine does. And here is Hal, revering Robert’s work and secretly in love with Catherine, bumbling and bungling everything. Out of this curious quartet, Auburn creates emotionally and intellectually enveloping music. The performances are perfect: Larry Bryggman’s lovable but exasperating Robert; Johanna Day’s officious yet well-meaning Claire: Ben Shenkman’s clumsy but gradually maturing Hal. As for Mary- Louise Parker, her Catherine is a performance of genius. Is there another young actress as manifold, incisive, sexy, and effortlessly overpowering? Add to this Daniel Sullivan’s superb direction and the classy production values (by John Lee Beatty, Jess Goldstein, and Pat Collins), and it all spells J-O-Y. Instead of taking up more time reading, you are urged to run and get your tickets immediately. Source: John Simon, ‘‘//Proof// Positive,’’ in //New York//, June 5, 2000, p. 106. **Or in the Heart or in the Head** //Proof//, which recently re-opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre after a run at the Manhattan Theatre Club, is the latest in a string of plays with one-word titles that represent the theater’s belated tribute to the conceptual mind. Tom Stoppard probably started the whole fashion with //Arcadia//, a period comedy that features, among other things, dialogues on English gardening and Newtonian physics. But the trend has exploded in the last few years to include Yasmina Reza’s Art, an argument provoked by a post-modern painting, Margaret Edson’s Wit, an infirmity play surrounded by a frame of metaphysical poetry, and Michael Frayn’s //Copenhagen//, a scientific discourse on the subject of quantum theory, indeterminacy, and atomic fission. These are the major examples of a genre with terse titles and prolix personae that has now managed to occupy the middle (or the middlebrow) ground of the Western stage. Proof Positive14 I am still trying to figure out why this development leaves me somewhat less ecstatic than it does my critical colleagues. Obviously we should encourage anything that raises the intellectual level of our benighted theater; and it is also true that some of these plays (notably //Wit//) have a lot more going for them than mental pyrotechnics. Yet the danger of this kind of Cliffs Notes approach to playwriting is that the dramatist, simply by dropping names or equations, will feel relieved of the obligation to investigate the emotional and spiritual aspects of the material, and the spectator will leave the theater feeling a lot more intelligent than he actually is. ‘‘Tell me where is fancy bred,’’ Shakespeare wrote, ‘‘Or in the heart or in the head.’’ There is no doubt that this playwright, at least, located the seat of the imagination (which he called ‘‘fancy’’) in the noncerebral parts of the human body. //Proof// is David Auburn’s first major production; and if it is not exactly the brilliant debut that some have been claiming, it certainly represents the work of a writer with a fairly decent grasp on his not terribly fanciful material. The ‘‘proof’’ of the title is a breakthrough mathematical equation regarding prime numbers, the authorship of which is a subject of dispute. Catherine (Mary-Louise Parker) is the daughter of an intermittently psychotic and recently deceased professor at the University of Chicago (Larry Bryggman), whose ghost comes to visit her from time to time. She has a fling with one of her father’s graduate students (Ben Shenkman) after she finds him rifling through her father’s notebooks. She is in conflict with her rather unimaginative sister (Johanna Day), who has come to sell the family house and move Catherine to New York. And when this relatively under-educated woman claims to be the author of the theorem in question (I am ruining what is intended to be a stunning first act revelation), there is some debate as to whether she is really treading in her father’s demented footsteps. We never learn the actual nature of the discovery, or why it constitutes such a great contribution to human knowledge. By his own admission, Auburn does not know or care much about mathematical theory. But what makes this play problematic is not its author’s ignorance regarding prime numbers. It is the thinness of his plot. He runs out of material so quickly that, by the middle of the second act, the play jerks to a halt and starts running in place. //Proof// sometimes looks like a rather austere stage version of //Good Will Hunting//, insofar as it features a whiz kid central character who is also an idiot savant. But if //Good Will Hunting// was concerned with questions of class, //Proof// focuses on questions of gender— how ‘‘Shakespeare’s sister’’ could have written all his plays if she hadn’t been forced to shine unappreciated on the ocean floor, and so on. David Auburn’s writing may not be terribly electric or dynamic. But Daniel Sullivan’s direction muffs the few opportunities that the playwright Mary-Louise Parker with her Tony award for //Proof// offers to hoist the action out of the quotidian. With its spectral visitations from the heroine’s father and its non-linear treatment of time, //Proof// is, after all, something of a ghost story. But the production remains mired in domesticity. It is relentlessly realistic, with John Lee Beatty contributing another in his gallery of Edward Hopper brick structures, and Neil A. Mazzela’s lighting failing to distinguish between the gritty present and the ethereal past. Where the evening does prosper is in the acting, especially in Mary-Louise Parker’s Catherine. I first saw this fine actress in 1988 playing Emily to Eric Stolz’s George in the Lincoln Center production of //Our Town//. Young as she was at the time, she made it instantly clear that she was born for the stage, a promise that she confirmed nine years later playing L’il Bit in //How I Learned to Drive//. Here she turns the twenty-eight-year-old Catherine into a restless, angry ragdoll of a woman with a frazzled slouch, who manages to accomplish one of the speediest costume changes in recorded history. (She goes up a whole flight of stairs, then appears seconds later on stage in a completely new set of rumpled clothes.) That she can also create such texture out of her underwritten role is an even more impressive feat of stage magic. Source: Robert Brustein, ‘‘Or in the Heart or in the Head,’’ in //New Republic//, September 13, 2000, pp. 28–29. Or in the Heart or in the Head15 Women have made valuable contributions to mathematics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Research the work of two female mathematicians and briefly describe their achievements. What do you think Catherine means when she refers in the play to ‘‘proofs like music?’’ What might mathematics and music, which on the surface seem so different, have in common? What signs does Catherine show that she is suffering from depression? What is depression? How is it recognized? What are the causes of it? How is it treated? In the script, the playwright uses the word ‘‘beat’’ as a cue for the actors. ‘‘Beat’’ means a pause in the dialogue, a moment of silence. It can indicate a moment of confusion or awkwardness or a change of mood in the characters. Examine act 1, scene 1, after Hal enters. From there to the end of the scene there are eleven beats during Hal’s conversation with Catherine. Imagine you are playing Hal or Catherine. What is each character feeling during each beat? Describe what the actors would need to convey at each beat. //Proof// was adapted to film and set to release in the United States some time in 2005. The screenplay is written by David Auburn and Rebecca Miller. Directed by John Madden, the film stars Anthony Hopkins as Robert, Hope Davis as Claire, Jake Gyllenhaal as Hal, and Gwyneth Paltrow as Catherine. Paltrow reprises her role as Catherine, which she played on stage in London’s West End. Auburn’s //Fifth Planet and Other Plays// (2001) contains several one-act plays that Auburn wrote before //Proof//. The plays are //Fifth Planet//, //Are You Ready, Damage Control//, //Miss You//, //Three Monologues//, //What Do You Believe in the Future//, and //We Had a Very Good Time//. //Wit// (1999) is a Pulitzer Prize–winning play by Margaret Edson. The protagonist is a female scholar of English literature who specializes in the work of the seventeenth-century poet, John Donne. She is now dying of cancer and uses the experience to explore mortality, the value of human relationships, and how life should be lived. //Copenhagen// (2000) is a Tony Award–winning play by Michael Frayn about Werner Heisenberg (a physicist who was head of the Nazi’s attempts to develop a nuclear bomb), Danish physicist Niels Bohr, and his wife Margrethe. Bohr and Heisenberg met in Copenhagen in 1941, and what they discussed has been a matter of dispute ever since. By adapting to the theater principles drawn from quantum physics, Frayn cleverly shows it is impossible to reach an objective understanding of what the two men discussed that day. //The Mind-Body Problem// (1993), by Rebecca Goldstein, is a coming-of-age novel set in Princeton’s mathematics community, about a young Jewish woman who marries a world-renowned mathematician. //Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen// (1998), by Clifford A. Pickover, examines the connection between genius and madness in a highly eclectic way. Pickover profiles many eccentric scientists, from Nikola Tesla to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski (who was a mathematician), as well as some writers and artists. Proof: Topics for Further Study16 Auburn, David, //Proof//, //Faber and Faber//, 2001. Barbour, David, ‘‘//Proof// Positive’’ in //Entertainment Design//, Vol. 43, November 2000, p. 19. Brustein, Robert, Review of //Proof//, in the //New Republic//, November 13, 2000, pp. 28–29. Clark, John, ‘‘So Smart It Hurts,’’ in //Los Angeles Times//, December 16, 2001. Foster, John Evan, Review of //Proof//, in //Theatre Journal//, Vol. 53, No. 3, October 2001, Performance Review Sec., pp. 503–04. Gussow, Mel, ‘‘With Math, a Playwright Explores a Family in Stress,’’ in the //New York Times//, May 29, 2000, Sec. E, Col. 2, p. 1. Hoffler, Robert, Review of //Proof//, in //Variety//, Vol. 380, No. 11, October 30, 2000, p. 34. Melton, Robert W., Review of //Proof//, in //Library Journal//, April 1, 2001, p. 100. Nasar, Sylvia, //A Beautiful Mind//, Simon & Schuster, 1998. Poincaré, Henri, ‘‘Mathematical Creation,’’ in //The Creative Process: A Symposium//, edited by Brewster Ghiselin, New American Library, 1960, p. 40. Rockmore, Daniel, ‘‘Uncertainty Is Certain in Mathematics and Life,’’ in the //Chronicle of Higher Education//, June 23, 2000, Opinion & Arts Sec., p. 89. Weber, Bruce, Review of //Proof//, in //New York Times//, May 24, 2000, p. B3. ———, Review of //Proof//, in //New York Times//, October 27, 2001. ———, ‘‘Science Finding a Home Onstage,’’ in //New York Times//, June 2, 2000, p. B1. Billington, Michael, Review of //Proof//, in //Guardian//, May 16, 2002. This review of the British production of //Proof// at London’s Donmar Warehouse censures the playwright for not explaining what the crucial mathematical theory is. Billington calls this the weak point of the play. Feingold, Michael, Review of //Proof//, in //Village Voice//, June 6, 2000. A review that is generous in its praise. Feingold points out that Auburn has no interest in explaining the finer points of mathematics; it is simply a given that for three of the four characters, mathematics is something they love, and the play is more of a love story than anything else—love of mathematics, love of father and daughter, and the growing love of Hal and Catherine. Heilpern, John, Review of //Proof//, in //New York Observer//, June 19, 2000, p. 5. A laudatory review that praises the play’s evocation of love between father and daughter, the fragility of life, and the discovery of love. The only flaw Heilpern sees is that the mystery of who wrote the proof is too easily resolved. Proof: Bibliography and Further Reading17 Parker, Christian, ‘‘A Conversation with David Auburn,’’ in //Dramatist Magazine//, December 10, 2001. In this interview, Auburn talks about how he became interested in writing plays and how his career developed.
 * eNotes: Table of Contents**
 * Proof: David Auburn Biography**
 * Proof: Summary**
 * Act 1, Scene 1**
 * Act 1, Scene 2**
 * Act 1, Scene 3**
 * Act 1, Scene 4**
 * Act 2, Scene 1**
 * Act 2, Scene 2**
 * Act 2, Scene 3**
 * Act 2, Scene 4**
 * Act 2, Scene 5**
 * Proof: Characters**
 * Catherine**
 * Claire**
 * Hal**
 * Robert**
 * Proof: Themes**
 * Genius and Madness**
 * Love and Trust**
 * Proof: Style**
 * Exposition**
 * Theatrical Surprise**
 * Proof: Historical Context**
 * Sophie Germain**
 * Trends on Broadway**
 * Proof: Critical Overview**
 * Proof: Essays and Criticism Critical Essay on Proof**
 * Proof Positive**
 * Proof: Topics for Further Study**
 * Proof: Media Adaptations**
 * Proof: What Do I Read Next?**
 * Proof: Bibliography and Further Reading**
 * Sources**
 * Further Reading**