Many Questions Worth Answering

What we have here in “Proof,â€� a 2001 Tony-  and Pulitzer-prize winning play by  David Auburn, is strife between sisters, duty to a parent, a loss, a romance, the diminishing of powers with age, serious insanity, trifling derangement, some snappy writing, a little math and, most pointedly, the towering choice to act on trust. Or to require proof.

   All the important stuff.

   The Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck is staging this spare, nifty play in a no-nonsense way. Is Catherine (Emily DePew) hallucinating as she speaks to Robert (Thomas L. Webb), her dead father? Maybe. But director Nicola Shear supposes Catherine might be just drinking alone and musing. And that works fine.

   Is it jealousy that makes Claire (Nancy O. Graham) belittle Catherine, her younger sister who dropped out of school to care for their father, a demented and failing mathematician? Or is Claire just hard and oblivious and bossy and maybe guilty, too?

   And what is all this about mathematicians peaking at 23 and after that it’s all over? Might they just as well teach high school if they have failed to prove something new and elegant by then?

   And can women do important work in math at any age?

   Hal (Michael Prezioso), Robert’s student, raises a lot of these questions, and in the end answers the most crucial one by deciding whether or not he needs proof to accept some astonishing work from an unlikely person.

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