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A Study Guide for David Auburn's "Proof"
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A Study Guide for David Auburn's "Proof," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
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A Study Guide for David Auburn's "Proof" - Gale
1
Proof
David Auburn
2001
Introduction
Proof (2001), a play by David Auburn, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, as well as several other major awards for drama. The play is set in Chicago, where Robert, a former genius of a mathematician who suffered from mental illness, has recently died. Robert appears in the play talking with his daughter Catherine, a depressed college drop-out who stayed at home and cared for her father over the last few years of his life. As preparations are made for the funeral and Catherine's sister Claire returns from New York, Catherine forms a tentative friendship with Hal, a mathematician who is one of her father's former students.
The plot moves into high gear when Hal discovers in one of the notebooks that Robert left behind a proof of a mathematical theorem that mathematicians had thought impossible. It is a sensational discovery, but Catherine stuns Hal by claiming she wrote the proof. But did she? The handwriting in the notebook looks very like her father's. As the mystery develops and resolves, the playwright explores issues such as what the link may be between genius and madness and whether either or both can be inherited. But Proof is also a story about human relationships, suggesting that developing trust and love can be as difficult, and just as uncertain, as establishing the truth of a mathematical proof.
Author Biography
David Auburn was born in Chicago in 1969. Raised in Ohio and Arkansas, he attended the University of Chicago where he studied political philosophy. At the time, Auburn did not know he wanted to be a writer, but he joined a student group that performed comedy sketches. Auburn started writing some of the sketches and found he had a talent for it. He then started to write longer pieces. After Auburn graduated in 1991, he won a writing fellowship offered by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Productions,
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