As might be expected of a Pulitzer prize-winning play, Proof was received enthusiastically by audiences and most reviewers. The stunning revelation at the end of act 1, when Catherine announces that it was she, not her father, who wrote the proof, was regularly greeted with gasps by the audience. Bruce Weber, in the New York Times, called Proof "an exhilarating and assured new play . . . that turns the esoteric world of higher mathematics literally into a back porch drama, one that is as accessible and compelling as a detective story." Weber admired the pacing of the play, and further noted that it "presents mathematicians as both blessed and bedeviled by the gift for abstraction that ties them achingly to one another and separates them, also achingly, from concrete-minded folks like you and me." Weber also appreciated the spirit of the play in which there was no meanness; the...