If one was a theater student in the early 2000s, there is a good chance one encountered David Auburn’s Pulitzer-winning play, Proof, a work of tidy structure, elegant rhyme and, not for nothing, commercial appeal. (For theater, anyway.) Auburn carefully calibrates the funny with the sad, balances credible realism with fugues of understated poetry. It was once described to me as a perfect play, in the formal sense, a template from which any budding playwright could draw inspiration should they want to write something smart but accessible, and endlessly producible. There’s even a grabby cliffhanger at the end of act one.
The sturdiness of Auburn’s construction can, it turns out, stand up to a lot. Evidence of that comes in the form of the director Thomas Kail’s new Broadway production, the first such revival in the play’s history and one that seriously tries its integrity. That the house is still standing at the end is a mighty testament to Auburn’s ingenious (and ingeniously simple) design.
