Proof (review)

For forty years, East West Players has produced such works as Wakako Yamauchi's Not a Through Street (1991–1992 season) and Garett Omata's S.A.M. I Am (1994–1995) in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo. Producing Artistic Director Tim Dang's most recent foray into American family drama regenerates the genre with a cross-cultural twist. The all–Asian American cast embraces this thoroughly Western piece, thereby abjuring the reductive images that have too long exiled minority performers from challenging roles that seem to assume the need for so-called nonethnic casting. Many would scan this production in vain for hints of distinctly Eastern theatrical traditions; instead, the Chicago setting serves as backdrop for the dramas of this Asian American family, whose singular complexity and cerebral swordplay secure their own place in twenty-first-century America. East West Players thus takes a bold reprieve from identity politics and allows the cast to claim its place at the heart of American family culture, where all multilayered "hyphenates" may claim a part. While the performers seem to revel in Proof's sheer dramatic range, this production also raises provocative questions about Asian-American self-image. Although Auburn conceived the world of Proof as an ethnic blank canvas, placing East West Players in the story's university setting both reinforces and refutes Orientalist notions of Asian Americans as subdued, numerically gifted types with skyrocketing SAT scores. Here, the cast succeeds in both dismantling stereotypes and illuminating Auburn's juridical themes. By transcending mere tokenism, the production spotlights the troubling cross-generational encounters in all families, where mental acrobatics may sometimes override true intimacy. The impressive result both topples reductive views of Asian Americans as bespectacled nerds and explores the link between truth and proof better than many productions to date. This production of Proof both invites squeamish spectators into Brechtian dissection of their own biases (do self-evident nuggets of proof govern or belie our view of the Other?) and teases textual subtleties from the tale.

The excellent cast (led by Kimiko Gelman as Catherine, Joanne Takahashi as her sister Claire, the glorious Dom Magwili as their father Robert, and David J. Lee as Robert's protégé) certainly proves that family conflicts plague all communities. Before Magwili's Robert succumbs to mental illness, his flashback scenes feature a lucid mind that conforms to Orientalist notions of Asians as mathematically gifted. His model citizen is a paradigmatic echo of East-West relations, where the Orient has historically submitted to confining labels in order to obtain the love of the dominant Other. Robert's seeming denial of ethnic selfhood is neither innocuous nor chilling, but a subtle, potent reality of postmodern Asian-American life. His devoted daughter Catherine poses a chilling conundrum: she boldly insists on her own talent, slipping into the patriarchal world of mathematics with ease. At the same time, her role of caretaker brands her as distinctly feminine in the most confining, conventional sense. Gelman's Catherine is both fragile and tough, embodying a male-female binary. Aggressive and submissive, cold and nurturing, Gelman both embodies and rejects the data-driven, patriarchal world she has inherited.

When Hal discovers a breakthrough proof in his late mentor's home, his determination to prove the author's identity propels the events of the play. Can the author be the late Robert, a mathematical prodigy whose final years of madness eclipsed his early glory? Could his daughter Catherine, who abandoned her own career to care for him, have written it, as she claims? The actors' sheer emotionality and savage wit illuminate juridical themes arising from the title itself. When potent minds collide (as in the first scene when Catherine...