Published Monday, November 22, 2004
Law School's Proof Offers Layers of Mystery
Recent Play Featured Arts in Education Student
Special to The Appian

Last week was the finale of Harvard Law School’s fall drama, David Auburn’s Proof, a play that opened on Broadway in 2000, won the Pulitzer for Drama and a Tony in 2001. 

Professor of Law Bruce Hay’s second directorial venture, Proof boasted a cast and crew from all over the University, including a current student from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Aside from its title’s distinctive legal connotation at first glance, why this particular play for a law school production that has no legal-eagle storyline?  

The story of Proof is reminiscent of a number of plays and films involving eccentric geniuses (usually male) and their often-rocky roads in the world of the mundane.   Here Robert, the mathematician-genius (played by Jonathan Jenkins, a former Harvard grad student) is a single-parent dad who slips into schizophrenia.  Of his offspring, both girls, Claire (portrayed by Sarah Bolling, a first-year at Harvard Law School) has made a successful life for herself as a Wall Street analyst. 

Younger sister Catherine (played by HGSE masters student Dana Frantz) cannot bear to leave dad, or is it that she is having difficulty letting go of her childhood home in Chicago?   At one point she is motivated to resume her college education in mathematics – not at her dad’s University of Chicago, but at all-time, cross-town rival, Northwestern.  Dad’s disabling schizophrenia has been in remission for some months, but before long, he slips back into the illness.  Catherine drops out of school again to come home and care for him.

A protégé of the professor, verrrry geeky 28-year old doctoral student Hal (played by second-year law student Taylor Dasher) craves the greatness achieved by his mentor at only 22.   Before the professor passes away, Hal has been spending time at the house and with Catherine’s permission continues the task of reviewing the mathematician’s 100+ notebooks in hopes of finding something of importance.   One may see shades of motivations in Hal’s eagerness:  Is he just total-geek and math is what does it for him?  Is he interested in “getting the girl”?  In helping to publish posthumously some great work of his mentor?  Of discovering something he can publish as his own in hopes of attaining fame and fortune for himself?

Hay, whose 1997 paper on the “burden of proof” no doubt has new meaning after weeks of rehearsal, does not have a theatrical background and said he selected Proof because it “examines one of the central problems we deal with in law school – the elusiveness of knowledge, both about the world and about other people,” he said.  “‘Proofs’ may be possible in the world of deductive mathematics, but in the world of human affairs, it is often difficult to know what happened in the past or what others are thinking.”  

Frantz, a student in the Arts in Education program and perhaps the most seasoned of the actors with “life-long involvement with theatre,” shared Hay’s sentiment.  She said the play was important for her because “it was so relevant to the graduate school experience . . .  the [sometimes] despairing panic . . . the fears.” 

Bolling, from Jacksonville, Florida, agreed, joking that the “constant insanity of working with Proof’s cast and crew has made the first semester of law school seem sane by comparison.”

In addition to the mysterious mathematical discovery concerning prime numbers, several layers of non-academic-type proof surface in the play: questions of sanity, of trust, of love, of priorities, of what really matters to a person at various stages of their lives, even proof that girls are as capable in math as boys.

Asked further about his rationale, Hay said he wants to produce pieces that “raise moral or philosophical problems, and force people to think.”   His directorial debut was last year’s The Crucible by Arthur Miller.  The 1952 Broadway play about the 1692 Salem Witch Trials was actually written in response to Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House on Un-American Activities Committee in its infamous crusade against supposed “communist sympathizers.”  Miller once said he believed that in theatre lies the “possibility for raising the truth consciousness of mankind.”   

Hay, who teaches both a fall and spring seminar on Law and Drama, also said he hopes to further the role of theater in “contribut[ing] to the intellectual life of the university.”   This sentiment echoes a core belief of the HGSE’s Arts in Education program: if we as students and as faculty can practice it, support it and believe in it, we can transport art with all its transformative powers beyond these school walls into schools, communities and lives.

What does one make of the eye-catching program cover that you also saw on the posters all over campus: numbers, equations, formulas, algorithms scrawled all over the page?  Director Hay would not divulge whether all that Greek posited an actual mathematical proof.  (Attorney/client privilege at work?)  But he was at liberty to disclose the following evidence:  (A) The text did in fact consist of real mathematical notes, and (B) The notes were in fact those of a real-life mathematician (friend of the prof).               

Maybe all that math figured into Hay’s own philosophic motivations after all.  The program booklet concluded in memory of Mrs. Louise Hay, Professor of Mathematics, University of Illinois at Chicago.  We learn that Louise, the director’s late mother, “was always concerned with encouraging young women to cultivate their mathematical talents.”  In case we were wondering about the director’s allegiances in the battle of the sexes on stage, at least one mystery requires no more proof. 

For those who missed the play, Miramax is bringing Anthony Hopkins (Robert), Jake Gyllenhaal (Hal), and Gwyneth Paltrow (reprising her role as Catherine, from the London stage production) to the silver screen in 2005.