Folks traveling along McGregor Boulevard are discovering an exciting new theater. Its name is Players Circle Theater. But it’s actually not new at all.
Until this past summer, Players Circle was located at the Shell Factory in North Fort Myers. Now, it’s next door to a Melting Pot restaurant and a block north of Prawnbroker Restaurant in Cypress Square.
On February 6th, Players Circle opened David Auburn’s drama, proof. The critically-acclaimed drama impressed Producing Artistic Director Bob Cacioppo from the moment he first read it.
“It’s always an honor and a thrill to do a great play like this,” remarked Cacioppo. “This play won the Pulitzer Prize for Best Play, the Drama Desk, the Outer Circle and a Tony Award for Best Play.”
Cacioppo first directed the play 22 years ago. With more than 200 professional productions to his credit, he believes that "proof" is one of America’s all-time finest plays.
“It’s about a father and a daughter. It’s about two sisters. It’s about taking care of someone with a mental illness," said Cacioppo. "The play functions on so many levels, and that’s why it will always be up there with "Death of a Salesman" and "Oklahoma" and the great plays ever written that won both a Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award.”
At the center of this play is a young woman named Catherine, who recently lost her beloved father. He was a mathematical genius, but also suffered from schizophrenia. So much so that Catherine had to drop out of Northwestern to take care of him in the years leading up to his death.
During this time, Catherine wrote a groundbreaking mathematical proof that echoes the iconic work her father did when he was the same age. Chloe Elliott-Chan plays the character, and describes the problem that her proof presents.
“Her masterpiece, her proof, which she has spent years writing is believed by the other characters to have been written by her genius father, and not her. And they will not believe her, will not trust her, which is another ironic thing about the play. It’s called proof, but her character is asking for faith, which I find interesting,” said Elliott-Chan.
Catherine’s overbearing older sister doesn’t think she has the smarts. Her father’s former star student, and Catherine’s new love interest, Hal, doesn’t think a woman could have possibly authored such a complicated mathematical theorem - particularly one who never finished college. In this respect, Hal is a stand-in for the sexist, patriarchal attitude that permeated the male-dominated field of mathematics during the timeframe of the play.
“There actually is a really strong current of feminism through this show, which a lot of people, you know, they might kind of scoff at, especially since it is written by a man,” said Steven Coe, who plays Hal. “But it is really delicately and smartly portrayed.”
Catherine regards Hal’s chauvinistic doubt as a betrayal of their fledgling relationship.
“It was based on a large amount of trust, and he completely breaks that,” observed Elliott-Chan. “Her sister does not believe this either, of course, that’s more understandable with her.”
Catherine has yet another, more insidious, problem. Just as the children of parents with Alzheimer’s worry that they might develop dementia in their later years, Catherine worries that she might also be prone to mental illness.
“She shares that spark of genius with her father, and that could also come with mental illness,” Elliott-Chan said. “Because she is a genius, she fears that, like her father, she will also go down that road.”
Themes like these are resonating with the audiences that have seen "proof" so far.
Aided by a set that consists of a smartly constructed house that Cacioppo and company have built inside the black box theater, and projections that help tell the story, "proof" is a highly immersive two hours of engaging entertainment.
"proof" plays at Players Circle Theatre through March 3, 2024.
Read more stories about the arts in Southwest Florida. Visit Tom Hall's website: SWFL Art in the News.
Audio is engineered and produced by WGCU's Tanner Jenni and Tara Calligan.
Spotlight on the Arts for WGCU is funded in part by Naomi Bloom, Jay & Toshiko Tompkins, and Julie & Phil Wade.
MORE INFORMATION:
Go here for more on the show.
Go here for play dates, times and ticket information.
- Another of Auburn’s works, tick, tick … Boom! is on stage February 9th through the 11th at Fort Myers Theatre.
- {proof} was originally developed at George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey during the 1999 Next Stage Series of new plays. The play premiered off-Broadway in May of 2000 and transferred to Broadway in October 2000, where it received extensive critical acclaim, winning a Drama Desk Award for Best New Play in 2000 and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Tony Award for Best Play, the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play in 2001.
- {proof} was inspired by real-life story of Nobel Prize winner John Nash, a gifted mathematician who suffered from schizophrenia. Nash’s story was also brought to life in 2001 with the Academy Award-winning film A Beautiful Mind, starring Russell Crowe. However, David Auburn’s {proof} reached audiences first, focusing on the relationship between fathers and daughters, the nature of genius, and the power of love.
- While {proof} is typically categorized as a drama, Players Circle Producing Artistic Director Bob Cacioppo thinks it should be viewed as more of a mystery. “It’s not a who-done-it. It’s a who-wrote-it.”
- While the play’s central character, Catherine, has made a breakthrough mathematical discovery, Cacioppo, Chloe Elliott-Chan and Steven Coe want people to know that you do not need to be a math geek to appreciate the conflict or enjoy the storyline of the show. In this regard, “it’s a play about math, but not about math,” quips Elliott-Chan.
- That said, Steven Coe thinks it important for people to know that there is historical precedent for the conflict that serves as the central premise for the show. In this regard, he mentions Sophie Germaine. “She was an incredible mathematician that’s kind of been rediscovered by history that didn’t get her due because she was a woman at the time, because they didn’t allow it,” says Coe.
- In the play, Hal dismisses the possibility that Catherine could have authored the proof in question because “all mathematicians are men.” Catherine counters with the story of Sophie Germain, an 18th century woman who taught herself advanced math while trapped in her home during the French Revolution. Denied admission to any university, she she wrote to famous mathematician Carl Frederich Gauss for instruction under a male pseudonym. He agreed and mentored her via correspondence, thereby enabling Germain to produce groundbreaking mathematical work. Once Gauss recognized her abilities, Germaine revealed her true identity to him and, to his credit, he remained supportive of Germain and her work.
- While Germain lived centuries before Catherine, the two women shared a struggle with sexism in math. Like Germain, Catherine has uncanny mathematical abilities that she struggles to convince others to recognize, and like Germain, Catherine has to produce groundbreaking work in order to be seen as credible at all.
- While Catherine and Germain fight an uphill battle to have their work recognized and accepted, neither had their work appropriated by others. The opposite was true for Williamina Fleming, Antonia Maury, Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Leavitt and Cecilia Payne, who are the central characters in Joyce Van Dyke’s docudrama The Women Who Mapped the Stars, which is being performed by the Alliance for the Arts at the Calusa Nature Center and Planetarium through February 18. Their discoveries in the field of astronomy some more than 100 years ago were pirated by the men they worked for and with and are only now being recognized for their contributions to the field.
- One of these women, Henrietta Leavitt, is also featured in Lauren Gunderson’s Silent Sky, which is being performed by the FGCU TheatreLab February 16th through the 25th.
- “It’s also so crazy and so sad that we can write so many pieces about [women not being given due credit for their discoveries] because of how much it’s happened throughout history,” Coe laments.
- Naturally, all of the doubt that Catherine experiences from her sister and Hal robs her of her self-confidence, which she covers up by projecting a gruff, no-nonsense and at times obstinate façade. “Your character goes through so much of a journey throughout, from the fronts she put up to opening herself up, to feeling so betrayed and dealing with her grief and her fears and everything,” observes Coe.
- From critics to Cacioppo and his cast, everyone who’s read the script or seen the play has been impressed by David Auburn’s elegant writing and the play’s structure and themes. “It’s a really brilliantly written show,” Coe assesses. “It’s really intricate. There’s a reason it won the Pulitzer, and you can really see that digging into the material. There is such great heart to the show. There’s an incredible brain to it, but such great heart, so many emotions. It is entertaining. It’s heartfelt. It is … it’s a truly beautiful piece.”
- {proof} is Players Circle’s fourth production in its new home on McGregor Boulevard. “So we opened our season with Breaking Legs, which was a silly farce about Italians and the Mafia. Then we did a very elegant Christmas show and then we revived an old romantic comedy that never gets done, Butterflies Are Free,” notes Bob Cacioppo.
- The action in {proof} takes place on the back porch of a home in Chicago, so Cacioppo and company built an entire house in the theater as part of their set. To better put themselves in the setting for the play, the cast took advantage of the cool weather we’ve been enjoying this winter and rehearsed the show outdoors. “We actually rehearsed it outside on a back porch and we did some of the romantic scenes, where it was like full moon and fairy lights,” shares Coe. “And, like, it’s great for an actor. I can just remember this. Perfect.”
