Chenango River Theater is presenting David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Proof, directed by former Chenango River Theater artistic director Bill Lelbach. Lelbach founded the company in 2007 and served as its artistic and managing director through 2021. He says the play’s story is particularly meaningful to him.
“This storyline is sort of close to home,” Lelbach said. “It won the Pulitzer Prize, it won multiple Tonys, and it’s a story about math and about the people who, in their brilliance at math, border on” mental illness.
The play centers on Robert, a brilliant mathematician who has developed schizophrenia, and his daughter Catherine, who has spent the last several years caring for him. Lelbach says the story draws on the real-life mathematician John Nash, whose life was portrayed in the film A Beautiful Mind.
“By the time he was 23, he solved three math problems that were hundreds of years, decades old, that had never been solved before,” Lelbach said. “It took committees of brilliant mathematicians to analyze his solutions and to realize that they were right.”
Catherine is a gifted mathematician herself, but she worries that she may have missed her chance to make a major contribution to the field. She also dropped out of college to care for her father, while her sister Claire has moved to New York City and supports the family financially.
The play begins on the day Robert dies, but Lelbach says Proof is not simply a story about grief.
“It has some lighter moments,” he said. “But it’s a compelling drama and a bit of a mystery, because a new proof crops up that was unexpected among Robert’s papers, and the authorship of that proof is in question.”
That mystery becomes central to the play, while Catherine and those around her struggle with questions of family, genius and the possibility of mental illness.
Lelbach has a personal connection to the story as well. One of his closest friends is an 85-year-old mathematician who was in John Nash’s class at Princeton and knew many of the people portrayed in A Beautiful Mind.
“He is himself a brilliant mathematician,” Lelbach said. “He knows all the people from the story, the film A Beautiful Mind, all the people in the book. Those were all people he dealt with on a regular basis.”
Lelbach says those conversations have helped him and the cast better understand the world of the play and the unusual personalities sometimes found among exceptionally gifted mathematicians.
The four-person cast includes Dayna Palya and Ryan Canavan, who appeared together in last season’s Dear Jack, Dear Louise. Amy Crossman returns to Chenango River Theater after appearing there in several productions over the past decade, and Sky Vogel makes his Chenango River Theater debut as Robert.
David Auburn’s Proof runs September 18 through October 4 at Chenango River Theater, 991 Route 12, just south of Green. Performances are Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., with Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. More information is available at ChenangoRiverTheater.org