By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic
Published May 26, 2005
Proof, David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning, math-driven play, has one more preview performance tonight at American Stage in St. Petersburg. The play then runs Friday through July 3.
Director Kate Warner said Auburn found the poet in the mathematician in this work. "What's interesting to me is that this play isn't so much about sciences and mathematics. It's about scientists and mathematicians. It's about what pushes them to solve these problems, about who they are and what drives them," she said.
Katherine Tanner, center, plays Catherine, a brilliant mathematician caring for her equally brilliant father, who suffers from mental illness until his death. She then finds a notebooks in which he has apparently solved a math equation that had been considered unsolvable. So the question arises: Was he really the author of the proof?
Julie Rowe, right, is Catherine's older sister Claire, and Brian Shea is the graduate student who wants to sift through the notebooks.
Proof is at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays, and 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays through July 3. American Stage is at 211 Third St. S, St. Petersburg. $25-$32. The preview performance at 8 tonight is half-price. (727) 823-7529.
It's vaudeville - "One Mo' Time"
Jnana Wilson, Phyllis Banks and Mia Bankston star in the West Coast Black Theatre Troupe production of One Mo' Time, which opens tonight and runs through June 4. Set at the Lyric Theatre in New Orleans, circa 1926, the vaudeville revue includes songs such as Darktown Strutters Ball, After You've Gone and Muddy Water. Musical director and pianist for the show is Lillette Jenkins-Wisner, reprising her role when One Mo' Time premiered at New York's Village Gate in 1979. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. today-Saturday and Tuesday-June 4; 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at Gompertz Theatre, 1247 First St., Sarasota. $23. (941) 363-9300.
