Produced by Special Arrangement with Dramatists Play Service
The Action of the play takes place on a porch in a Chicago neighborhood in the year 2000.
There will be one 10-minute intermission. Help yourself to a water bottle in the fridge.
This Production Was Originally Produced
by the University of Oklahoma Helmerich School of Drama.
The play has two female casts, performing alternately.
Germaine Cast:
Abby Vitt, Spencer Morgan, Chris Freihofer & Lexy Babler
Performing Thursday night, Saturday Night, Sunday matinee
Primes Cast:
Miriam Worley, Spencer Morgan, Chris Freihofer & Emily Harris
Performing Friday night, Saturday matinee, Sunday night
DIRECTED BY
ALISSA BRANCH
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
JAMES McCABE
STAGE MANAGER
BECCA DAVIS
SCENIC DESIGN
ALISSA BRANCH
SOUND DESIGN / MUSIC SUPERVISION
CHRIS FREIHOFER
SOUND EDITING
CHRIS OZ MCINTOSH
Meet The Team
Abby Vitt Catherine (Germaine Cast)
Abby is a junior Acting Performance major at the University of Oklahoma. Theater credits include Mac Beth, Life of Galileo, LIFE SUCKS., Romeo & Juliet, Chicago, The Laramie Project. Film roles: Cricket, To Watch TV. (Performing Thursday night, Saturday night, Sunday matinee)
Miriam Worley Catherine (Primes Cast)
Miriam is a sophomore acting major at OU, originally from Philadelphia. Recent theatre credits include: Oh to be Pure, Again (collegiate premiere), Red Bike, and Drowning Girls with the school of drama. She also regularly works with Gaylord college students on their short films! She is so excited to be working with this amazing group of people and has loved every part of this process. (Performing Friday, Saturday matinee, Sunday night)
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Spencer Morgan Harold Dobbs
Spencer Morgan is a current Junior at the University of Oklahoma where he is majoring in Acting Performance. He originates from Lubbock, Texas. Some of his favorite theatrical credits include Lenny in Marisol, Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Dwight in Dead Man’s Cellphone. He intends to graduate with a BFA in Acting from the University of Oklahoma in May of 2025.
Chris Freihofer Robert
Chris Freihofer returns to the stage after a 7-year absence, last appearing in Oleanna at The Factory Showroom. He is the former artistic director of Stone Soup Theater and Duty Free Productions. He produced, directed and/or acted in over 80 theatre productions, appearing on stage for such companies as Oklahoma Shakespeare in the Park, Oklahoma City Theater Company, Synchronicity Theater Company, Stone Soup Theater and many independent productions. Stage appearances include Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Speed-The-Plow, Oleanna, A Lie of the Mind, Buried Child, Hamlet, Othello, Night of the Iguana, The Glass Menagerie and more. Film appearances include Land of Gold, O, Leaves of Grass, W, Parkland. TV appearances include Love and Death, Longmire, Friday Night Lights, Prison Break and more, but he is best known as playing corrupt attorney Dan Wachsberger on AMC's acclaimed series Breaking Bad. He also works behind the camera as an award-winning CSA-member casting director, working for such filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Terrence Malick, Cameron Crowe, Andrea Arnold, William H. Macy, Sterlin Harjo, Paul Dano and many more. He teaches the On-Camera Acting program at OU, and is the owner and director of The Actor Factory, where he teaches Auditioning for Film & Television.
LEXY BABLER Claire (Germaine Cast)
Lexy is a junior Acting Performance major at the University of Oklahoma, originally from Dallas, TX. Stage roles include The Maids, The Life of Galileo, LIFE SUCKS., What Happened While Hero Was Dead, Theophilus North, The Drowsy Chaperone. Film work includes RingMan, The Book of Jobs. (Performing Thursday night, Saturday night, Sunday matinee)
Emily Harris Claire (Primes Cast)
Emily Harris is a sophomore acting performance major at the University of Oklahoma, originally from Marietta, GA. Theater credits include Oh To Be Pure Again, Carrie The Musical, She Kills Monsters, Heathers The Musical, Revolt She Said Revolt Again. Short films include Hey Hun and The Mathematics Defense. (Performing Friday, Saturday matinee, Sunday night)
Alissa Branch Director
Alissa is a theatrical, voice-over, and visual artist, as well as an Actor Factory instructor. Favorite directing credits include Oklahoma Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet (2024), Pride and Prejudice (2022) The Taming of the Shrew; Phoenix Theatre: The Circumference of a Squirrel; Butler University: The Dreaming of The Bones (with subsequent tour of Southern Ireland). OU University Theatre: Twelfth Night, Arcadia, Summer and Smoke, Clybourne Park, Miss Evers’ Boys (KCACTF Region 6 Director’s Choice Award 2014, and 2014 Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award, National Arts Festival, Grahamstown, South Africa); Mary Stuart; Anna in the Tropics; Julius Caesar; 9 Parts of Desire (KCACTF Region 6 Director’s Choice Award 2011). Alissa also directed the regional premiere of the new play, Shakespeare’s Other Women, which received Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival Region 6 awards for Outstanding Work with Heightened Text, and Excellence in Ensemble Acting. Favorite regional acting credits: Titania / Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Oklahoma Shakespeare); Emily in Bluff (Phoenix Theatre); Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing; Lady Percy in Henry IV, Part I; Hermione in The Winter’s Tale; Catherine in Proof, and Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire. Alissa serves as Associate Professor of Acting in the Helmerich School of Drama at the University of Oklahoma and her voice can be heard on hundreds of commercials for radio and television. She recently created and released a 12-episode video master class for The Great Courses Plus called “Shakespeare: From Page to Stage” which can be streamed on their website. Alissa lives with her teenage sons and her partner, singer-songwriter and actor Tim Grimm, with whom she hosts acoustic house concerts for their music series Red Dirt Folk Salon and shares an art gallery called Black Chalk Studio.
Becca Davis Stage Manager
Becca Davis is thrilled to be a part of Proof. Past stage management credits include Much Ado About Nothing, Footloose: The Musical, and Eleemosynary (KMC Onstage). This is Becca’s first production in Oklahoma, having most of her theatre experience in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Some of her favorite credits from Germany outside of stage management include Young Frankenstein (Director), Mamma Mia! (Director), Sweeney Todd (Asst. Director, Props Master), Much Ado About Nothing (Props Master, Dogberry), and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (Props Master, Schwartzy). Becca is a TOPPER award winning Stage Manager and Props Master, for her work on Footloose and Much Ado. In her free time, Becca is an avid traveler, and will always make time to stop at a local bookstore or coffee shop in every new city. Becca would like to thank her family and friends for their continued support.
David Auburn Playwright
David Auburn is an American playwright, screenwriter and theatre director. He is best known for his 2000 play Proof, which won the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play and Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He also wrote the screenplays for the 2005 film version of Proof, The Lake House (2006), The Girl in the Park (2007), and Georgetown (2019). Other plays include Lost Lake, The Columnist, Skyscraper, What Do You Believe About the Future? and Summer, 1976.
DIRECTOR'S NOTES
PROOF, A Director’s Note
Art is an attempt to find communion. It’s a search for recognition, an artist’s way of asking, am I alone in this experience of being human? My love affair with David Auburn’s PROOF started in 2000, the year before it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. I read it for the first time in one sitting, in a coffee shop in Indianapolis. I finished the last page and immediately walked down the street to the Phoenix Theatre to find my friend Bryan Fonseca. I have to be in this play, I told him. I recognize these people. As a man who was unfailingly kind to young artists, he graciously agreed to produce it.
The protagonist of PROOF is the daughter of a math genius. My father was an astrophysicist at The University of Oklahoma for thirty-seven years, specializing in using supernova spectrum readings to calculate the expansion rate of the universe. He spent his career using math to ask, essentially, how can I prove the rate at which we are all flying away from each other? In his retirement, he’s written a massive astrophysics textbook and leads a weekly zoom for graduate students around the world. I feel especially at home on this porch with Catherine, Robert, Claire and Hal because I grew up around big thinkers, on this campus.
PROOF is a play about mathematical mysteries; it’s about what can be proven, yet it asks us to believe some things purely on faith. It’s a meditation on grief and loss, and an exploration of the complexities of familial bonds. It’s a love letter to (and gentle critique of) modern academia. It’s an exquisitely constructed drama laced with wit, heartbreak, and moments of grace – it is an elegant play.
I hope you will each find your own reasons to linger on this porch, and your own sparks of recognition in the characters that populate it. It’s an honor to share this story with my extraordinary cast, creative team, and with the OU community.
Alissa Branch
February 2024