The ‘Proof’ of Playwright’s Talents Is in His New Work’s Prizes

“This is the awards season,” says playwright David Auburn, soft drink in hand, “so I’m not expecting to get a lot of work done.” Well, of course not.

There he was, for instance, at New York’s raffishly upscale Palm Restaurant, waiting to get the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best American play for “Proof,” his surprising, sad and funny drama, ensconced in Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theatre. Just three days earlier, “Proof” had won the Drama Desk Award for outstanding play, accompanied by another swell party. And before that came a slew of other awards, topped by the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Now, Auburn is about to find out whether “Proof” has won the ultimate theater-world plum--the Tony for best play.

Not bad for a 31-year-old writer whose only previous professionally produced play was a short-lived off-Broadway work. The 1997 “Skyscraper,” which ran only three weeks, was his first full-length play; “Proof,” a commercial as well as a critical success, is his second.

And with its success has come the buzz--the hobnobbing and interviews and travel that go hand in hand with renown, especially when it is so suddenly earned. Through it all the appealingly low-key Auburn seems to have retained a sense of balance, albeit one peppered by a healthy dose of pleasure at some of the neat people he has met. (Meeting Arthur Miller was “thrilling.” Sitting at the same table with show biz veterans Betty Comden and Adolph Green was a hoot, and talking to Edward Albee wasn’t too shabby either.)

“It’s been crazy. That’s a good way to describe it,” says the slightly bemused Auburn of his recent life, which has included commuting every couple of weeks between New York and Williamstown, Mass., where his wife, Frances Rothfeld, is an assistant professor of history at Williams College. “The strangest thing is that the play keeps rolling forward, starting from the fact that I never expected it to be produced.” That forward roll landed “Proof” a successful off-Broadway production last year at the Manhattan Theatre Club, followed by the move, cast intact, to Broadway last fall. And meanwhile, all those awards have kept rolling in, too, for Auburn’s offbeat play about genius, madness and family love.

“Proof” stars Mary-Louise Parker as an eccentric 25-year-old woman who has spent her adult life caring for her father, a noted mathematician and professor whose brilliance was extinguished by insanity. Parker’s Catherine apparently has inherited her father’s extraordinary mathematical gift, but fears that--unlike her stable, yuppie sister--she may also harbor his dark gene for dementia. The father’s death, and the discovery in his papers of an unpublished mathematical proof, touch off the events of the play.

Besides the post-mortem discovery that gives “Proof” its title, the drama is also about other sorts of proof: Proof of love, proof of sanity, proof of a woman’s ability to function in a traditionally male-dominated field. And, in a couple of gasp-producing and comic twists, it’s also about proof of authorship of the hotly contested mathematical paper.

Yet, while there is mention of math theories here and there, “Proof” is hardly about mathematics. The play had its start when “I had this idea about two sisters arguing over something the father has left,” Auburn explains. “I often have a lot of ideas floating around, and I’m looking for ways to link them together.” In this case, “the other idea was someone worried about getting their parent’s mental illness.” How did he find the connecting thread?

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“I like reading popular-science type books anyway, and I’d picked one up on math,” he says. And--eureka!--there was his answer. “The math proof appealed to me for a couple of reasons,” he says. “One was that authorship could be called into question the way a book or a painting couldn’t be. The other big thing was the historical fact that a number of great mathematicians had suffered from mental illness. That gave me a link, a way to fit them together.”

While Auburn asked some mathematicians to check his script for accuracy, he says he always knew that math was just a means to his end: “I was writing a family drama with an academic background.”

His own family drama also has an academic background but sounds a lot less tortured than his main character’s. Born in Chicago, he moved early to Columbus, Ohio, where his father was an English professor at Ohio State University. The family then moved again to Jonesboro, Ark., where, yes, Auburn met then-Gov. Bill Clinton several times. (“The great thing about it was he would come to your high school graduation. . . . He was a big guy with a big aura.”)

While Auburn “did a lot of theater” as an extracurricular activity in high school, he went on to the University of Chicago with the intention of being a political science major in preparation for a career in international relations. “Proof” is set on the porch of a dilapidated house near the University of Chicago. The playwright-alumnus has even tucked in a few jokes at the expense of Northwestern University in nearby Evanston. Evanston jokes, Auburn explained with a grin, are “the equivalent of New Jersey jokes.”

If Chicago clearly made an impression on the young Auburn, political science didn’t. It took a while of writing comedy sketches for a student troupe called Off Off Campus and doing theater reviews for the school newspaper “so I could get tickets to all the plays” for Auburn to realize his interests lay elsewhere. In 1991, he became one of 10 national winners of a screenwriting fellowship sponsored by filmmaker Steven Spielberg. So Auburn spent a year in Hollywood, writing a script “that didn’t really go anywhere.” His fellowship over, “I found myself going broke, and I thought I would rather be broke writing plays in New York.”

In late 1992, he moved cross-country and lived the life of a theater hopeful: “I founded a theater company with friends, and we put on shows in tiny theaters, and I worked at boring jobs. I temped a lot.”

Throughout those relatively lean years, he says, his parents, both of whom are “big theater fans,” were “always extremely encouraging.” None of the eccentric or disturbed characters are based on his family, he said.

In New York, Auburn also made it into the Juilliard playwriting program, studying under such well-known playwrights as Marsha Norman and Christopher Durang. “It was great. It was the first time that I’d ever had people with their level of experience talking about my work. And a lot of times, Juilliard students would perform it.” It was at Juilliard that Auburn wrote “Skyscraper,” which he describes as “slightly more absurd and complicated than ‘Proof.’ I felt that on the next one, I wanted to do something simpler and more grounded in character.”

The limited run of “Skyscraper” (“We didn’t get terribly good reviews; my mother describes them as ‘mixed,’ ” he deadpans) left Auburn feeling frustrated and still earning his living at one of his numerous “day jobs.” So when his future wife had to go to London to do research for her PhD, Auburn says, “I did quit my day job. I took all my savings and went to London for the summer and wrote ‘Proof.’ ” The show’s remarkably smooth sailing still amazes Auburn, starting with its casting at the Manhattan Theatre Club.

In a reading for the key role, “Mary-Louise came in, and she was startling. She understood the part and she just nailed it.” The edgy, pizza-eating Catherine is not your classic heroine, and Parker displayed “a willingness not to be nice, not to be amiable,” says Auburn. (In what Auburn calls a “fantastic” development, not only was Parker nominated for a Tony for her performance, but each of the other cast members and director Daniel Sullivan also received Tony nominations.)

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With “Proof” seemingly enjoying a life of its own, Auburn has been on to other things. He has worked on “tick, tick . . . BOOM!,” a musical by the late Jonathan Larson (“Rent”), who had tested it only in workshop productions before his death. “There were about five different drafts that he had done, so they asked me to put together or edit one final script for production,” said Auburn. The off-Broadway show is now in previews.

And he has done a film adaptation of a novel by Scott Anderson, called “Triage,” for director Sydney Pollack. Another play, about which he’ll give no details yet, is percolating, waiting for his attention this summer. And for the moment, of course, he’s been at all those awards ceremonies, garnering honors for “Proof.” Part of the awards process, said Auburn, “is hearing from people you haven’t heard from for years.”

Not that he minds. “I got an e-mail from my favorite high school teacher,” he says. “She said, ‘Now that you’ve won the Pulitzer, I hope you’ve learned how to spell the word ‘receive.’ ”