What proof do you need to trust someone you love, who seems to do the impossible — or to trust your own potential for genius? Auburn's 2001 Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning play explores the boundaries of trust in a love triangle that involves the edges of madness. Cathy becomes severely depressed with years of caring for her father, Robert, a retired math professor and genius in his youth, who gradually loses his sanity. She fears she's inherited his talents for both math and delusion. She also fears falling in love with Harold, her dad's grad student in Chicago, and battles her sister Claire, who visits from New York and plans to move her there.
Ironically, the play increases audience engagement with the characters and trust in their story's value through tricks of identity and leaps back and forth in time. But close attention by the viewer pays off in poignant and insightful ways at each twist of the plot and tear in the relationships. Cathy clings to her father even in the terror of becoming too much like him. Robert hopes for the return of his brilliant "machine" while his brain leads him into alienating deceptions. Harold longs for the genius of both of them, and loves them each deeply, yet can't decide which to believe in. Claire tries to act pragmatically but bears the guilt of finding success in a different city, while neglecting loved ones at home.
Karina Roberts-Caporino astutely performs the many distinctive shades of Cathy, from manic-depressive delusions to primal rage for property, to girlish infatuation, mature mourning, and the deep bitterness of intimate betrayals. Scott Alexander Miller plays Harold as an aptly flustered geek with powerful passions, caught between love and a notebook as conflicting treasures. Frances Bendert explores the various attitudes of Claire, involving kindness and control, reason and pain. Yet George Gray is a bit miscast as Robert, older than in the script, with his words difficult to discern at times, not showing the mathematical or delusory precision of the character's reviving and failing brain.
The set, designed by James Burns, Jr., extends poetically from a screen door at the corner of the intimate box theatre to a wooden deck, plastic chairs, TV tray, trash can and recycling bin full of used aluminum, chain-link fence, fallen leaves, and plank swing on long ropes—into the CAST lobby where the audience first meets the mathematical themes of the play and gets a tiny notebook as ticket. Lighting effects (designed by director Wright) are also evocative, but delay transitions between scenes. The costume designs by Rebecca Randolph subtly suggest shifting identities with Cathy in a red shirt or pajamas, Harold in dark blue and green flannel, Claire as more golden, and Robert in graying shades.
There is a fine 2005 film of Proof, directed by John Madden, and starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins, which uses cinematic devices to expand the play. (I wrote about that film in my book, Death in American Texts and Performances.) But there are other benefits to entering the world of this CAST production, with its edges of pain and humor, kindness and cruelty, reason and madness, love and aging. Its ghostly presences and mathematical figures are highly thoughtful, yet very accessible — and moving in many ways.
Review by Mark Pizzato
Mark Pizzato is Professor of Theatre at UNC Charlotte and author of Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain, Theatres of Human Sacrifice, and Inner Theatres of Good and Evil. His plays have been published by Aran Press and his screenplays, produced as short films, have won New York Film Festival and Minnesota Community Television awards.
We leave traces of our lives everywhere we go. This show develops such traces into fantastic acrobatic displays, beautiful dance moments, and many funny scenes — through the creative imaginings of seven performers: six male and one female, including four Canadians, one Frenchman, one Brit, and one American.
The set is simple, unlike other artistic circus (or "cirque") shows on tour today. This puts the focus on the performers' own creativity, individual personalities, and athletic, musical talents. Yet, there are projections, too, of the performers' live drawings on the canvas sheets, stretched between bare scaffolding at the back of the stage, and various other lighting effects. The performers play various instruments: a piano, a guitar, and makeshift musical items such as bouncing basketballs. They also use a stack of small rings to jump through (like wild beasts in a traditional circus), skateboards and rollerblades to ride and leap across the stage, poles to climb and jump between like monkeys, a lever to fly high and land on a target pad, and a large ring to spin within like Leonardo's Vitruvian man in motion. They mostly wear grey suits and white shirts, though the female performer dons a stunning red dress for her solo flight on hanging straps.
The performance extends horizontally across the stage, vertically above it, and out into the audience. Performers introduce themselves individually, using an old-style hanging microphone, like in a boxing ring. They show some playful friction as they jostle for presence onstage. Yet each charms the audience in distinctive ways, mixing self-expressed characteristics, anecdotal stories, and competitive talents. There is also a love duet between the largest man and the woman, dancing together acrobatically, with hugs, spins, climbs on each other, twirls, flips, and leans into sculpted shapes of attraction/rejection and passion.
Indeed, all members of this troupe combine, in intricate interactions and surprising feats, like seven fingers on one hand (the name of the group in French). If you want a cirque that focuses on the human animal, expressing the world within each of us, through talents that amaze and lace the traces of life into collective laughter and sublime beauty, then this show is a must see while it visits here—rippling through Charlotte minds.
Review by Mark Pizzato
Mark Pizzato is Professor of Theatre at UNC Charlotte and author of Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain, Theatres of Human Sacrifice, and Inner Theatres of Good and Evil. His plays have been published by Aran Press and his screenplays, produced as short films, have won New York Film Festival and Minnesota Community Television awards.
Typically having friends over for a nice quiet impromptu dinner doesn't morph into an uninvited and demanding overnighter who parks her entire Louis Vuitton collection in the guest house for a treacherous month, unless you're hosting a four-times divorced, nicotine-addicted, famous actor.
Real life writer Elizabeth Fuller, played by Sheila Snow Proctor, decides to share her beautifully odd experience of becoming BFTs (best friends, temporarily) with her childhood idol, the famous actor Bette Davis after she allows her to stay in her Connecticut cottage "for a few days" while her New York City hotel handles a strike. With a forever-burning cigarette super-glued between her fingers, Bette Davis, grandly played by Charlotte favorite Hank West, arrives in style. Making demands and flicking ashes wherever, it doesn't take long for her infectious dry laugh and potty mouth to strike a nerve with Liz's husband John, and influence the vocabulary of young son Christopher, both narrated by Proctor. Although Sheila Snow Proctor is an effective Liz, the story would have been better without the narration, but instead cast actual actors for the husband and son.
Ms. Davis, the self-proclaimed ugly duckling, has moments bad and good when she shows hints of both disdain and compassion. She hates everything about Joan Crawford, despises Paul Newman's work ethic, and is deeply hurt about her daughter's book My Mother's Keeper. But, she misses her late mother Ruth, grows grandmotherly-fond of little Christopher, and is devoted to the happiness of her fans.
Liz attempts to have a backbone in Bette's presence but turns to mush each time her idol opens her mouth and uses that throaty voice she's so famous for. Having written letters to Davis and frequenting the local theater with her grandmother, Ol' Ma, as a teen, Liz still cherishes the trading cards that she received from Davis's team, and can only see the now old talented woman as an angelic sign that her late grandmother sent to fulfill her fantasy.
Husband John finally gives his enamored wife an ultimatum to ship out Davis, the actor lasting 32 days at the same address, using the same phone number, and having to listen to his four year old channel her at bedtime. Although the ladies have bonded over cheesecake and adult beverages, life at the Fuller residence has come to halt while Bette works on her novel. Her flaws are overlooked and her crassness is reveled in, only by Liz.
The set, designed by Tim Baxter-Ferguson and Kristian Wedolowski is simple but effective. It certainly mirrors a quaint cottage for a regular American family. The coffee table doubles as Liz's dust bucket of a car, while a subtle black curtain hides Davis's digs during her worn-out stay. Iesha Nyree Hoffman deserves golden praises for turning Hank West into the garish Hollywood icon, complete with 1980s blue eye shadow, sticky eyelashes, and heavy pale facial powder.
Prior to seeing Me & Jezebel I honestly didn't know much about Bette Davis and her huge legacy, but after West and Proctor took a bow, I wanted to read all about her. Review by Dawn Cauthen Thornton
Dawn Cauthen Thornton is a freelance writer in the Charlotte area currently working on a screenplay, a novel, and many freelance articles. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Writing for Stage and Screen from Queens University of Charlotte. Her work has appeared in Uptown Magazine. Dawn enjoys reviewing theater productions, movies, and loves most things artistic.