Don Cheadle made his Broadway debut tonight in Thomas Kail’s revival of David Auburn’s Proof, which opened at the Booth Theatre with Ayo Edebiri making her own first appearance on Broadway. Cheadle played Robert, the brilliant mathematician at the center of the play, while Edebiri took on Catherine, the 25-year-old college dropout whose fear of inheriting her father’s genius — and his madness — drives the story.
Jin Ha and Kara Young also appeared in the cast. The production gives new life to a play that first arrived on Broadway in 2000 and went on to win both a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize, a measure of how durable Auburn’s story has remained.
That durability comes from the way Proof turns a family story into a puzzle. Catherine is left trying to sort through her father’s brilliance after Robert has already been dead for days when the opening conversation takes place in her mind. The result is a revival built on both math and memory, with the Booth Theatre audience seeing a father-daughter relationship that never really leaves the room.
The tension in this production is not whether Cheadle can carry a Broadway role; it is whether the play’s blend of grief, intellect and inheritance still lands with the force that made it one of the defining dramas of its time. Opening night answered that by putting an Oscar-winning actor and a Broadway newcomer into a story that still has something sharp to say about what children inherit from their parents.
