Tucson Weekly Review Just Genius
Just Genius
All-time greats in music and math are at the center of two newly opened plays
by James Reel
Genius is the subject of two plays that opened downtown last weekend. It's musical genius at work in Arizona Theatre Company's Beethoven, as I Knew Him, whereas mathematical virtuosity lies behind Beowulf Alley Theatre Company's Proof. But in each case, human failings and aspirations are what really drive the stories.
Mad genius is the subject a few blocks north of ATC's headquarters. Beowulf Alley Theatre Company has just opened David Auburn's Proof, a play that ATC presented seven years ago. ATC is an Equity house, while Beowulf Alley depends mainly on local, nonunion talent, but this new production holds up well.
To borrow from my previous synopsis of the play: Proof is set on the dilapidated back porch of a Chicago home, a place haunted by the morose, spectral Catherine—but she's not the family member who's dead. The dearly departed is her father, Robert, a brilliant mathematician whose life deteriorated into mental illness. Catherine, now 25, has spent what should have been her college years caring for her declining father. She seems to have inherited his mathematical gifts; perhaps, she fears, she has also inherited his mental disorder.
Exhausted, isolated and cynical, Catherine sits by while Hal, a young math professor and one-time disciple of Robert's, studies notebooks Robert left behind. One element of Robert's final illness was graphomania; he wrote compulsively, most of it nonsense. But he had revolutionized three fields of science while still in his 20s, and Hal doesn't want to risk overlooking some gem of an equation.
Meanwhile, Catherine's prim, professional older sister, Claire, has breezed in from New York to organize the funeral and maybe Catherine's life.
Eventually, Catherine leads Hal to a notebook like the others, except this one contains not gibberish, but a long, spectacular mathematical proof more advanced than anything Hal or his University of Chicago colleagues can fully comprehend. That's the first big surprise; the second is that Catherine, who dropped out of college as a sophomore, claims it's her work, not her father's.
Beowulf Alley's production, directed by Sheldon Metz, doesn't play up Auburn's flashes of humor as effectively as the ATC effort did, but the character interactions are, for the most part, more supple and nuanced. As the interfering Claire, Chris Farishon may sometimes seem a bit too overbearing, but perhaps that's only in the context of the restraint shown elsewhere on stage. Jill Baker is a fine Catherine, with a healthy dose of bitterness adding crackle to her mope, and she has good rapport with Roberto Guajardo as Robert, who has a lovely, affectionate monolog about bookstores in autumn. Jonathan Northover plays Hal with a delicate balance of shyness, confusion and multiple kinds of desire.
All this plays out on a fine set designed by Metz, who directs with that quality Auburn's characters so desperately desire: lucidity.
Proof
Presented by Beowulf Alley Theatre Company
7:30 p.m., Thursday-Saturday; 1:30 p.m., Sunday, through April 26
11 S. Sixth Ave.
$20
882-0555; http://www.beowulfalley.org/
