David Auburn’s play Proof, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for Best Play, is a complex, layered drama about a young woman struggling to find room for healing and trust in a world that is imploding around her. Catherine’s struggles with herself, her brilliant yet unstable father Robert, her well-meaning but controlling sister Claire, and her father’s passionate and devoted protégé Hal provide a dynamic context for exploring the often fine line between creativity and madness, familial love and emotional suffocation, and self-perception and reality. Catherine exhibits signs of the same remarkable genius as her father, but she fears she will also inherit the mental illness that robbed him of his career and ultimately his ability to function in the world. Her sister Claire urges Catherine to abandon her amazing gift and embrace the mental stagnation of a safe and structured life. However, it is Hal who begins to perceive the truth of Catherine’s life and introduces her to the possibility of risking something big for something great. At the center of the conflict is an earth-shattering mathematical proof whose authorship is in dispute and around which our characters engage in a ferocious battle of mind, heart, and soul.

Directed by David McCullars, Trinity Street Players’ Proof cast included three fantastic additions to the TSP community: Bridget Farias, Gary Clarke, and Dr. Circe Sturm (moved director to beginning of sentence). Proof ran Feb 17-March 10, 2012.