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An Analysis of the play, Proof

The four characters are Catherine, a woman in her mid-twenties who looks after her brilliant yet unstable mathematician father, her sister Claire who regularly resides in New York, and Harold (or “Hal”) who was a student of Catherine’s father at the University of Chicago. The show opens late at night. Catherine is sleeping on her porch and is surprised by the sudden appearance of her father. He is a mathematician, and she has evidently inherited a talent for mathematics but is not pursuing it. We discover that her father’s funeral is the next day and that it is also her twenty-fifth birthday, she was daydreaming his visit. A male student of her father’s, Hal, appears from the study, saying that someone must examine the dead man’s notebooks. When Catherine discovers he has pilfered one, she is furious and calls the police. They arrive as the scene ends. During the next few scenes – which jump back and forth between the present and the past – we learn that the girl h...

Posted by: Alexander Bartfield

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