Curtain Call Theatre - Braintree, MA

Auditions for PROOF by David Auburn

Directed by Peter Kates
Produced by Meg Young

Mon/Tue August 30 & 31 @ 7pm

Auditions will consist of readings from the script

Catherine, age 25, sacrificed her own college education and early adulthood to care for her father, Robert, a once-prominent mathematician who had spent his last years mentally ill. At his death she must deal with Hal, a former student of her father's who hopes to find valuable work in the notebooks that Robert wrote in his last years; and with her elder sister, Claire, who is trying to manage Catherine's life. As Catherine confronts Hal and Claire, she is also confronting her own hopes and fears: the issue of how much of her father's genius - or madness- she has inherited.

{Interested people are encouraged to read A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar. This is a biography of John Nash, on whom Robert seems to have been modeled, and contains insights on mathematical genius and the kind of mental illness Robert had and Claire fears.}

Roles for 2 men and 2 women:

ROBERT is in his 50's. A mathematical genius, before he was 25 he had revolutionised several fields in the discipline. Seven years ago he became mentally ill (but non-violent and therefore not needing confinement) with only a short period of remission four years ago when he bacame lucid and tried to work on math again. He has always shared a close bond with his daughter Catherine.

CATHERINE
Catherine, 25, has spent her young adulthood staying home to care for her father - except for a few months four years ago, when he was "in remission" and she enrolled in a university mathematics program. When he relapsed, she returned home, and for four years has had no life other than caring for him. Since she seems to share much of his mathematical ability, she fears that she has inherited also his mental instability.

HAL
Hal, 28, teaches mathematics at the university. Catherine's father had been his thesis advisor during that short period of mental recovery four years ago, and Hal reveres the man both for that and for the great work he had done in his youth. Hal hopes that somewhere in Robert's papers he will find something of mathematical significance - he knows himself to be no genius, and such a find would be the best way to advance his career.

CLAIRE
Claire, 29, has made her own career in New York, has a fiance, and over the years has left the actual day-to-day care of her father fo her sister Catherine - for which she feels some guilt. She fears (with some justification) that Catherine is unstable and may go the way of their father, and she hopes to get her to move to New York where she (Claire) can keep an eye on her.

Questions?
e-mail: auditions@curtaincallbraintree.org