Hudson Stage Company’s latest triumph, Proof opens in Armonk

Hudson Stage Company’s latest triumph, Proof opens in Armonk: The Hudson Stage Company’s production of David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Proof, that opened at Whippoorwill Hall in Armonk on Friday night, demonstrates again what a local treasure they are. The production treated a sold-out crowd to a performance that lived up to the intrigue of this clever whodunit about genius, madness, and a ground-breaking mathematical proof that brings sisters and lovers to a divide.

John Wojda’s 100 proof performance

Dan Foster’s direction offers his cast room to lay back without breaking the bounds of a well-crafted psychological thriller. John Wojda, for his part, affably embraced the internal space of the mind of Robert, a world-renowned University of Chicago Professor of Mathematics suffering from mental illness. Tuning the strings of Robert’s at once genial and driven personality, Wojda maintains the tension on which the plot depends, namely, was Robert mad or lucid at a crucial moment in his past. Only the answer to that can determine whether his daughter Catherine is mad or genius now, and who is the real author of the proof.

The number of books approaches infinity as the number of months of cold approaches four…”

“Let X equal the quantity of all quantities of X. Let X equal the cold. It is cold in December. The months of cold equal November through February. There are four months of cold and four of heat, leaving four month of indeterminate temperature… In September the students come back and the bookstores are full. Let X equal the month of full bookstores. The number of books approaches infinity as the number of months of cold approaches four…”

Happy Birthday, I Died Last Week

The play opens with Robert, and Catherine celebrating her twenty-fifth birthday with a bottle of champagne. He salutes her for her gifted mind. “You understood prime numbers before you could read.” Admonishes her to stop reading those magazines and “sit down and do some mathematics.” They openly discuss his medical history and reminds her, as she seems to have forgotten, that he died last week. She questions if she is suffering the onset of mental illness and he affably offers that this conversation she is having with her dead father, is “not a good sign.”

With one playful note Auburn sets the dramatic equation for the plot that follows.  In short order Catherine catches Hal, one of Robert’s graduate students who is reviewing his notebooks, sneaking one of them out of the house in his backpack. Can he be trusted? Or did he find something worth publishing that he will claim credit for?

Catherine’s sister, Claire, a currency trader, comes home for the funeral, and arranges to sell her father’s house and bring her sister to live with her and her husband in New York. Can she be trusted? Or is she planning to commit her sister to a mental institution?

Into the bed and into his head

After Catherine decides to sleep with Hal, she leads him to one of her father’s notebooks that contains a paradigm shifting mathematical proof about prime numbers for which he is very grateful. Then she drops the bombshell that she wrote it herself. Is it possible that Catherine, a college drop-out with no advanced mathematical training, is responsible for this groundbreaking work – composed in her father’s notebook in a handwriting strikingly similar to his?

Of course, Robert has not been lucid for years – except a brief nine- month period several years back when he resumed his position at the university and took on Hal as one of his students. Did he also resume productive work during that time or was he “just teaching?” Only Robert, and perhaps Catherine would know. The question is not can Claire and Hal trust Catherine. But will they?

Jenna Krasowski, as Catherine, Cadden Jones as Catherine’s sister Claire, and Jayson Speters as Hal are all called on to judge and be judged in their roles. Each, in turn, are asked for trust and must ask to be trusted as they play out a mystery that can only be solved together. Check out the Hudson Stage Company’s revival of Proof and find out who you can trust.

John Wojda recently appeared on Broadway in The Nap. His television credits include Madam Secretary, Blue Bloods and Law & Order. Jayson Speters is a winner of the Jane Alexander Award for Acting and has extensive off-Broadway credits. Cadden Jones has worked in television, theatre and film and can be seen in the upcoming reboot of Tales of the City on Netflix. Jenna Karaowski has extensive stage and television credits.

Performances of Proof continue through April 13 at Whippoorwill Hall Theatre at the North Castle Public Library in Armonk.

Photos courtesy of Rana Faure

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