Staff Picks: Ayo Edebiri's Broadway debut and an exploration of the divine

Tessa Strain plays Julian, who chooses to seal herself away from the world in order to pursue a life devoted to heavenly matters, with an enjoyable earthiness. She’s headstrong and determined, yet in awe of what religion has in store for her. She strikes out away from home, to the chagrin of her well-to-do mother, and shapes her life with her own hands—even if that means living in service to something others simply don’t understand. This proto-feminism, like the bubonic plague sweeping England during Julian’s lifetime, gives the character’s self-imposed exile a sharp modern resonance. So too does the artificiality of the costumes, the sets, the landscape. This is play-acting, a visible act of translation where Julian’s experiences are being tied to our own, and the lives captured in our oldest English texts move once again through our most modern methods.

Those expecting something more audience-friendly, though, may find themselves held at a distance by Golum’s dedication to the words, by the stiffness of the proceedings, and by the restraint with which the drama deals with the human side of divine devotion. But thanks to Strain’s gripping debut turn, a few sensational Ken Russell-like sequences of otherworldliness, and a contained runtime, Revelations Of Divine Love will have no problem winning over those with even the slightest openness to experimentation. Audiences who give in to the vision will be rewarded with elegant observations about our past and present. Prepping for Christmas, dealing with parents whose noses are deep in our business, figuring out our place in a world that doesn’t seem to want anything to do with us—over the centuries, some things never change.

Drew Gillis: Proof on Broadway

It can be nerve-wracking to see a screen actor you really enjoy perform on the stage for the first time. There’s no guarantee that their skills will transfer between mediums, talented though they may be at one of them. What a relief, then, that Ayo Edebiri absolutely nails her Broadway debut in Proof, a revival of David Auburn’s Pulitzer-winning 2000 play. She maintains the precision of acting in a close-up while proving that her talent can resonate to all 766 seats in the Booth Theater. 

It doesn’t hurt that she’s fully supported by her cast and the text. Edebiri opens the show as Catherine opposite Don Cheadle, also making his Broadway debut, playing her University Of Chicago mathematician father, Robert. After Robert’s death, Ph.D. student Hal (Jin Ha) sorts through notebooks full of rambling equations while Catherine’s sister Claire (a superb Kara Young) flies in from New York, offering a somewhat thorny olive branch. Robert was once brilliant but suffered periods of mental instability as he aged; Catherine’s similarity to both his genius and his instability give the story its motion and informs her interactions with the rest of the characters. 

Proof is shockingly fun and exciting for a play nominally about math. Of course, like most good pieces of art, it’s actually about the humanity underpinning its subject matter. The word “proof” refers not just to the mathematical term but to belief and how much we might be able to trust our own flesh and blood. When I left the theater this week, any doubts I may have had about these actors’ transitions to the stage were cleared.