Theater of Ideas

...But the audience soon learns that Robert is dead, and that Catherine is in the midst of planning his funeral...

...Much of Copenhagen, including the relations of the characters, remains uncertain...

...What that means for Broadway, however, is that the characters are assumed to grow in appeal when the hard sciences take on a humanistic tint...

...Catherine is a woman with little formal education in the man's world of higher mathematics...

...The protagonist, Vivian, is an esteemed scholar of John Donne Donne and the other British metaphysical poets often strove for what they called "wit...

...Proof ends hopefully...

...After seeing the original production of Hapgood in London in 1988, I happened to meet Felicity Kendal, who played the title role...

...The treatment of cancer in Wit is graphic to the point that it unnerves audiences...

...In particular, the new production of Proof, by David Auburn, deals with the daughter of a mentally ill mathematician, and in doing so, treats topics of genius, mental illness, the patronizing of women in the academic world of math, and love (a subject with which Broadway has dealt before, from time to time...

...To get credit for the proof, she must prove her mathematical gifts and prove her sanity as well...

...The physics presented remains at a fairly obvious level, and the point of the uncertain plot is human relations accented and flavored by the cognitive models of physics...

...Catherine has led an isolated life in which she put her father first...

...That requires both plays to rely on flashbacks, which they do, most effectively...

...Into this setting comes the self-admitted geek Hal (Ben Shenkman), a brilliant student of Robert's who has invited himself to go through Robert's study and scour the mathematician's notebooks...

...Hal assumes the late Robert wrote it before he lapsed into illness...

...She is "the great White Sister," so to speak, who patronizes her sister, fearing that Catherine may soon be imprisoned by her father's genes...

...In Hapgood, Stoppard employs quantum physics to treat espionage in a Cold War setting...

...Thirty-one-year-old David Auburn's Proof has just made the transition from the off-Broadway, non-profit Manhattan Theater Club to the Walter Kerr Theater on Broadway...

...Rather than mathematics, last season's Broadway hit Copenhagen uses nuclear physics as its metaphor...

...So many plays have appeared in recent years in which science and math are a metaphor—or at least a pretext—for portraying any number of themes, that they form nearly a genre of their own...

...That sounds trite, but it actually works in Wit, resonating dramatically throughout the play...

...The action of Frayn's play reconstructs that meeting from the various perspectives of Heisenberg (played by Michael Cumpsty), Bohr (Philip Bosco), and Bohr's wife, Margarethe (Blair Brown...

...Wit, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Margaret Edson, is a bit different...

...Then, too, Catherine may be suffering from the onset of the illness that ruined Robert's life and career...

...However much Broadway might like to preen, none of the pretexts in the new genre of intellectual plays are actually very intellectual...

...It touches on science through the medicine of oncology—connected, curiously, with English literature...

...These two works both desire to present the "romance" of math and science: the romance of discovery, of the intellect, and of the mathematicians and physicists themselves...

...For Auburn, creative genius has undeniable beauty, but that beauty is achieved at the price of harrowing pain...

...But the medicine in Wit is harder edged than the math in Proof or the physics in Copenhagen—and Wit succeeds, perhaps even better than Proof or Copenhagen, in and dying of ovarian cancer...

...She assists Bohr in his work, both as typist and sounding board...

...Copenhagen begin, oddly, with key characters dead and speaking from the grave...

...Auburn may have intended his play to be an apt, incisive drama of a family torn by different personalities and different lives...

...To illustrate this, the playwright has come up with the metaphor of mathematics...

...Though the physics may make Frayn's play seem less accessible than Proof, Copenhagen has, in fact, a reputation for being more intellectual than it deserves...

...She is witty, sarcastic, and sardonic—very much the alienated outsider who is doubted by Hal and Claire...

...Heisenberg maintains that he stayed in Germany in part to keep the bomb out of Hitler's hands by slowing down the development of its atomic weapons program...

...Her cancer and medical treatment give her new insights into works like Donne's "Death Be Not Proud"—just as Donne gives her insights into her cancer and treatment...

...In that sense, Copenhagen is similar to Tom Stoppard's Hapgood, mounted at New York's Lincoln Center in the mid-1990s...

...Catherine gives Hal a key to Robert's study drawer and Hal uncovers a complex mathematical proof, one that only a genius could develop...

...Proof opens with a scene between Robert (played by Larry Bryggman) and his daughter Catherine (Mary-Louise Parker) on Catherine's twenty-fifth birthday...

...Margarethe is a particularly interesting character...

...But this is, of course, Frayn's ostensible point, as he makes clear in the thirty-seven-page postscript to the published version of the play...

...For both Frayn and Stoppard, ambiguity is the method and manner of drama...

...To indicate radiation treatments, the actresses in the lead role shave their hair and eyebrows...

...Though she has no formal background in physics, she is like Catherine in Proof, if only in that she has real scientific ability—^and greater insight into Heisenberg and Bohr than either man has into himself...

...Surprisingly, although rather sentimental, that ending seems appropriate—especially in this case, where the topics are not only the rare qualities of genius, but the hope for good, sound mental health and the hope for love...

...If "dumbing down" is the process by which most ideas make their way to the stage, some of the plays in this new genre are examples of "dumbing up"—taking on the prestige of deep scientific ideas without doing more than gesturing at them...

...Science and Donne's metaphysical poetry provide the play's pretext and central metaphor...

...The play had a successful run offBroadway before embarking on its current national tour...

...The play, running at the Royale Theater, is inspired by a trip that German physicist Werner Heisenberg made to Nazi-occupied Copenhagen at the height of World War II in 1941...

...What distinguishes Proof from most other treatments of these old, old themes is Auburn's analysis of the peculiar nature of genius—and the emotional instability that can appear in the life and work of the gifted...

...Set on the south side of Chicago, near the University of Chicago, the play presents a set of family relations: the love of father and daughter, and the mistrust and hostility between sisters...

...While there, Heisenberg is rumored to have met with his one-time mentor, the half-Jewish physicist Niels Bohr...

...Edson's theme, in part, is that the illness that will eventually take Vivian's life has also changed her life, altering her perception of herself and her past as she approaches her demise...

...But when the intellectual pretext breaks through to become a genuine metaphor, then the play succeeds: not as science, but as art...

...But it is an axiom of theater that a play can take on a life of its own—which is what Proof does, ever so poignantly...

...Vivian moves about the stage attached to an intravenous tube...

...turning its pretext into a metaphor for the human condition...

...So, too, in a different sense of the word, Vivian is a great wit, and her wit remains throughout her deterioration and slow death brought on by her cancer...

...Also arriving is Catherine's older "ever practical" sister, Claire (Johanna Day), who is intent on selling the house and moving Catherine to New York...

...Both Proof and Glenn Speer is a writer in New York City...

...When I asked her if she could explain the quantum physics to me, she pointed at Stoppard and laughed, "He doesn't even understand it...

...At the first act's curtain, however, Catherine claims to have written the proof herself—hence the double meaning of the title: the mathematical proof itself, and Catherine's need to prove that she did it...

...The Tony Award-winning British import Copenhagen, by Michael Frayn, more directly infuses physics into its text with endless discussions of the morality of nuclear weapons, the nature of friendship, complicity with evil, and perceptions of truth and betrayal...

...And that is why Wit works so well as a play...

...The play includes some fairly intricate discussions of physics, including Heisenberg's own "Uncertainty Principle...

...The physics in Copenhagen is more complicated than the mathematics in Proof, but it is, again, primarily a metaphor for human character and the moral implications of the atom bomb...

...Proof takes on this question of gender without Auburn delivering a diatribe or melodramatic, sanctimonious political statement...