PROOF Begins Tonight at TheatreWorks

TheatreWorks Silicon Valley continues its 2015/2016 season with David Auburn's brilliant contemporary drama Proof, winner of the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. This riveting masterpiece tells the still timely tale of a young woman caught in a quest for legitimacy in the male dominated world of high-level science. It is a mystery of family instability and fledgling romance, an exhilarating, funny, and fulfilling tribute to the humanity that permeates our world of equations, equivocations, and codes. Proof will be directed by TheatreWorks Associate Artistic Director Leslie Martinson and features a talented cast including L. Peter Callender, Michelle Beck, Ashley Bryant, and Lance Gardner.

Performances will be presented tonight, October 7, through November 1 (press opening October 10) at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro Street (at Mercy), Mountain View. For tickets ($19-$80) and information the public may visit www.TheatreWorks.org or call (650) 463-1960.

Proof ran an astounding 917 performances on Broadway in 2000 (the longest running Broadway play in two decades) and was called "Rich and compelling. Full of life, laughter, and hope" by the New York News and "A beautifully put-together play" by The New York Times. In 2001 Proof won the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The show went on to run in London's West End (2002), and was later adapted into a movie (2005) starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins.

David Auburn (playwright) is a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, screenwriter, and director best known for his play Proof. Auburn also wrote the screenplay for the movie The Lake House, made his directorial debut with The Girl in the Park, for which he also wrote the screenplay, and returned to Broadway in 2012 with The Columnist. More recently, his play Lost Lake, starring John Hawkes and Tracie Thomas, opened at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York City in 2014.

TheatreWorks has assembled a brilliant cast for Proof including Michelle Beck, Ashley Bryant, L. Peter Callender, and Lance Gardner.

Michelle Beck plays Catherine, the young woman who inherited much of her father's mathematical genius, and, she fears, his "instability" as well. Beck has been seen off-Broadway at Public Theater, Epic Theatre Ensemble, and Red Bull Theatre, regionally with Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Shakespeare Theatre of DC, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Sakas Theatre, and has appeared in film and television.

Ashley Bryant plays Catherine's sister Claire, a practical and business-minded woman who has been comfortably successful in her work and relationships, having left their father Robert behind. Bryant has appeared in several popular television series including "Elementary," "Gossip Girl," "A Person of Interest," and "Nurse Jackie" among others. She has performed on stage with Signature Theatre, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Theatre Askew, Yale Repertory Theatre, and in the Bay Area with Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

L. Peter Callender plays Robert, Catherine and Claire's recently deceased mathematician father, praised for his groundbreaking work in his youth, but whose later years were plagued by delusional mental illness. A Bay Area favorite, Callender has appeared on Broadway, Off-Broadway, in regional theaters across the US, and has performed internationally in Japan, England, and France. He is currently the Artistic Director at African-American Shakespeare Company and an associate artist at California Shakespeare Theatre. TheatreWorks audiences will remember Callender as Sterling in Radio Golf.

Lance Gardner plays Hal, one of Robert's Ph.D. students. Gardner has been seen on many Bay Area stages including at Marin Theatre Company, California Shakespeare Company, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Encore Theatre, and City Light Theatre, among many others. At TheatreWorks he appeared in Superior Donuts, Auctioning the Ainsleys, and Anna in the Tropics.

Leslie Martinson (Director) is TheatreWorks' Associate Artistic Director and has served as a director and administrator at TheatreWorks since 1984. At TheatreWorks, Martinson's most recent directorial credits include last season's Water by the Spoonful, Warrior Class, the Regional Premiere of Time Stands Still, the 2012 West Coast Premiere of The Pitmen Painters, and the company's acclaimed 2010 production of Superior Donuts. Her other TheatreWorks directing credits include The Grapes of Wrath (co-directed with Artistic Director Robert Kelley), the Bay Area Premiere of Putting It Together, and the West Coast Premieres of The Boys Next Door, Brilliant Traces, If We Are Women, Theophilus North, and The Voice of the Prairie, among others. A graduate of Occidental College, Martinson was a Watson Fellow, a member of Lincoln Center Directors' Lab, a member of the La MaMa International Directing Symposium, and has served on Theatre Bay Area's Theatre Services Committee since 2002. In 2009, she was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship in Stage Direction from the Arts Council of Silicon Valley for artistic achievement and community impact.

With some 100,000 patrons per year, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley has captured a national reputation for artistic innovation and integrity, often presenting Bay Area theatregoers with their first look at acclaimed musicals, comedies, and dramas, directed by award-winning local and guest directors, and performed by professional actors cast locally and from across the country. A home for artists developing new works, it was at TheatreWorks that Memphis, the 2010 Tony Award-winning musical that played on Broadway for three years before embarking on a 19 month national tour, was first workshopped and received its world premiere. It is currently enjoying an extended run on London's West End, where it recently captured two Olivier Awards.

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