A superb new quartet on the Fox stage

By Charles C. Nash

Special to the Daily Mail

Sponsored by Dr. Ron and Linda Showengerdt and most ably directed by current CCPA president Kim Bessey, David Auburn's splendidly realistic psychological puzzler and Pulitzer prizewinning "Proof," playing at the Fox Playhouse Sept. 14,15 and 16, at 8 p.m., and Sept.17, at 2 p.m., marks a welcome advance in Nevada theater fare's sophistication.

By the term "sophistication," I don't mean words and situations that would've offended Disney; but, rather, a level of maturity in themes and their treatment that should gratify theatergoers who still miss the passing of the serious, non-musical play from the American stage.

The central situation involves the University of Chicago's late math professor Robert (movingly played by Mike Bessey) and his daughter Catherine (beautifully enacted by CCPA first-timer Lacy Leonard). Robert, speaking from the grave, recalls being fully aware that young mathematicians are the ones who make the significant advances, and remembers nearing retirement with his life work still incomplete. And so he, for reasons that remain ambiguous, secures his loving daughter Catherine's help in completing his work, even though Catherine's sister Claire (played warmly by Michelle Hart, who has paid Catherine's way through college, and who is now convincingly alive to the living death facing her sister, if she's entombed with her dying father) tries unsuccessfully to get Catherine to move with her to New York City.

And, finally, to round out the quartet, there is the new love of her life, the late professor's student Hal (forcefully but sensitively enacted by Daily Mail sports editor Joe Warren), who, in going through the dead man's dusty old notebooks, discovers a brilliant proof regarding prime numbers. He, too, tries, but fails, to pry Catherine away from her father's loving grip from beyond the grave.

Even though the tricky time sequence and lengthy flashbacks of "Proof' don't allow you to doze off, the setting for all nine scenes remains "the (perhaps unnecessarily generic) back porch of a house in Chicago." Thus, the setting might as well be a lectern in a lecture hall. And that means that what carries the play is the writing itself, about the momentous issues of family, love, guilt, trust, and death, but within a warmly human context. And that, dear reader, means it all boils down to the acting. And what acting it is!

I only hope the CCPA has videotaped this performance, which is a casebook of the craft. It's that good!

Go see for yourself.