Living Proof Trinity journeys to the center of the mind By Bill Rodriguez
	Proof By David Auburn. Directed by Brian McEleney. With Nehassaiu deGannes, Timothy Crowe, Mauro Hantman, and Phyllis Kay. At Trinity Repertory Company through October 12.

David Auburn’s Proof may have its flaws, with a plot contrivance here and a suspect motivation there, but it didn’t pick up the Pulitzer for drama a couple of years ago because it was just lying around. This is as skillfully constructed a play as you’ll find, and at the service of greater concerns than itself. Proof is far more involved in stimulating questions than in supplying answers, and Trinity Repertory Company is well up to the task of shaping a similarly self-effacing production.

The questions on tap tend to be imponderable rather than ponderous, matters centering around how we get to know what we know. How do we know whether someone (ourselves included) can be loved or even trusted? And if we know that, how do we know we’re not deluded about it, out of wishful thinking or even some pathology? How can any of these things be proven and if they are merely proven to our satisfaction, is that enough?

A mathematical proof and who discovered it is the ostensible big mystery in this play, but that’s just the MacGuffin. Three of the four characters are mathematicians, and there’s just enough number theory talk to let us glimpse into that arcane world. This is no Copenhagen or Arcadia, where Michael Frayn and Tom Stoppard were interested in teaching us the concepts being discussed. Here what is under examination is the human heart and mind and their interconnections.

Perspective on all of that is kindly provided by Michael McGarty’s smart set design. The back wall is painted a shimmering cobalt blue, twinkling with tiny stars. Everything takes place on a backyard plank deck in Chicago. Like the elegant mathematics of the brilliant Robert (Timothy Crowe), excess is stripped away and we get to see only what we need to: sticking up like a monolith is the back screen door of the house; behind it, a simple room. Even the railings on the deck are abstracted away. If the house is metaphorically the mind, then out here under the stars is where its inhabitants can get a breath of fresh air and perhaps some clarity.

Living with Robert for the past few years has been his daughter Catherine (Nehassaiu deGannes), taking care of him through the madness that has consumed him. She put her life and career on hold, not even going to college until he got better and dropping out when he got worse. Since this play is about knowing and not knowing, puzzlement and suspense are apt devices to keep us guessing and wondering. So there’s plenty left when I reveal, as Auburn immediately does, that Catherine is hallucinating the entertaining conversation she is having with her father in the opening scene. He had died a few days earlier, and there will be no facile suspense in later discussions about whether she is losing her mind. The playwright has bigger fish to fry.

Her sister Claire (Phyllis Kay) has come for the funeral and to convince Catherine to come back with her to New York and, Catherine fears, to psychiatric care. Also around for these few days is a former grad student of her father’s, Hal (Mauro Hantman), whose doctoral dissertation Robert put back on the right track during a long lucid stretch four years prior. Hal is there to go over the 103 notebooks that Robert obsessively filled in recent years, to see if they contain anything besides incoherent ramblings.

Wisely, beautifully, director Brian McEleney keeps this all focused on the relationship between Catherine and Robert, though the text offers plenty of opportunities to divert us. Sister Claire is quite a busy-body: pouring coffee, she insists, after Catherine says she’d like hers black, "Have a little milk." But Kay passes up chances to make her pushier and thereby funnier, letting us admire rather than shrug when we learn she paid the mortgage.

Auburn writes emotionally-grounded, and therefore at times humorous, dialogue. But while Hantman’s portrayal of the nervous protégé Hal is quite funny, it is nuanced rather than obvious. Director McEleney’s attentive pacing helps here; the long pause after Hal’s breezy "Nice funeral" is as comical as his mortification the next beat, but Hantman’s inexhaustible foot-in-mouth variations seem fresh.

Crowe’s most valuable contribution is how he creates for us a sense of loss, a sense that this is a man we want to live for a thousand years. There’s a scene where we see the mathematician seemingly at the top of his powers, and when we understand what’s really going on, it chills us to the bone. In that moment, how deGannes handles Catherine’s face has much to do with how strongly we are affected. Much of this production relies on her reaction to him when they are not speaking. The flash of pride and relief on Catherine when Robert expresses confidence in her math prowess packs in essays-worth of illumination into father-daughter relationships.

This production of Proof certainly doesn’t squint at the Big Picture, but it really wants to look at the intimate one-on-one perspectives. How fitting for the opening play of its 40th year, since that’s how Trinity has earned and kept its rep.