S54 02 Proof Notes
Proof Director's Notes: From Randy Warren
An interesting summer: Three months ago I was asked to direct Proof, a widely-produced play and movie. I had never seen it; hadn’t even read the play before.
My connection with the story, characters, subject, and the playwright’s style was immediate, evoking for me Bob Dylan’s lyrics in Tangled Up In Blue: “Then she opened up a book of poems/And handed it to me/Written by an Italian poet/From the thirteenth century/And every one of them words rang true/And glowed like burnin’ coal/Pourin’ off of every page.”
Math runs in the family line: My cousin Leon proved the Malgrange-Ehrenpreis Theorem. To me, math is fun. Sick, right?
As a director, the unusual thing is that Proof’s script contains nearly no stage directions. So this play I’ve never seen does little to explain itself in terms of motivations, meanings or emotions. Most importantly, it does not describe the actors’ movements, so nearly all the physical action you see tonight had to be invented during rehearsal.
When the play is done, I will look at YouTube, to see what was common to all or unique only to us. Either way, the production you are about to see should be a fresh take on an excellent play that won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for Best Play, an impressive and surprisingly rare combination.