PROOF
1/2
The Walter Kerr Theater, 219 W. 48th St. (212) 239-6200.
WHEN you have to recast a Pulitzer Prize/Tony Award Best Play hit, you need to be extraordinarily watchful – especially when it’s approaching its third year on Broadway.
Luckily, the casting has always proved inspired in “Proof,” David Auburn’s mix of mystery and mathematics at the Walter Kerr Theatre, where it has just received an electric jolt with a completely fresh team led by Anne Heche and Len Cariou.
A luminous Mary-Louise Parker first played Auburn’s heroine, Catherine, the vibrant daughter of a dead mathematical genius. She seemed irreplaceable, but in time was replaced by a differently but equally luminous Jennifer Jason Leigh.
One perfect replacement might be pure luck, but now the producers and director, Daniel Sullivan, have done it again. Heche, while totally different from her predecessors, is simply magnificent.
Heche, with movie and TV credits to her name, is making her Broadway debut. Indeed, no other theater credits are mentioned in her resume.
The theater has an old-fashioned distrust of actors who emerge from other media without suitable apprentice years of board-treading. Perhaps this was once partially fair – I wouldn’t have much fancied seeing Lana Turner in “Medea” – but today actors are actors, and talent rules.
Heche moves onstage with the unflurried confidence of a goldfish in a bowl, and she gives a nervy, slightly batty yet convincing picture of, well, “a beautiful mind.”
For the crux of Auburn’s play turns on whether or not his heroine Catherine wrote a mathematical proof that would match her father’s work in his heyday, and set the mathematical world afire.
Heche makes that possibility her guiding light, and in this sense her performance appears more purposeful and nuanced, than that of her predecessors, who sought a more rounded picture.
She also has a fine ensemble to play in. As her adored, crusty, probably nutty father – seen only as a fantasy ghost and in flashback – Cariou is masterful, as is a crisp Kate Jennings Grant as Claire, the bossy sister, and a nerdy Neil Patrick Harris as Hal, Catherine’s bewildered suitor.
If you haven’t seen “Proof,” now would seem a perfect time. If you have, go again. You might be surprised to find that some theorems have more than one solution.