The first thing winning the 2001 Pulitzer Prize changed for David Auburn was his dinner plans. The 31-year-old playwright was on the telephone with his wife, discussing what to have for dinner, when a call-waiting “beep” brought the announcement that his play Proof currently running on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre, had nabbed the prestigious honor. “I said ‘Thank you very much,’ and went back to my wife and said, ‘I won the Pulitzer,’ and she said ‘Congratulations,’ and so we decided to go out for dinner.”

David Auburn. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Apart from having “a sense that perhaps there’s a little more opportunity, in that it’s likely that my next play will be produced,” says Auburn modestly, his life hasn’t changed much; it still revolves around “the same friends, the same apartment.” Such matter-of-factness has steered him through periods of early uncertainty and is sure to keep his head from spinning as his success builds. (And build it will, with Proof the most honored play of the season, having received not only a Tony Award, but the Drama Critics Circle, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Drama League, and Lucille Lortel Awards.)

By now, nearly everyone has read about (if not seen) Auburn’s offbeat, poignant, and warmly entertaining play about a young woman coming to terms with her father’s complicated legacy and her own uncertain future. Auburn is amused when people refer to it as “the math play”—his intent was to write “a family drama with an academic background.” Using mathematicians as characters in a play intrigued him for a number of reasons: it was unusual enough to draw comment (and to provide territory relatively untrod), and offered an area of intellectual creativity in which a solitary, quirky character could conceivably produce something of extraordinary brilliance in complete isolation. But while the mysterious authorship of the mathematical proof moves to center stage at the end of the first act, it is the evolution of character that concerned Auburn as he constructed the play. “I wanted to write something more naturalistic than my first play” (Skyscraper, a conceptual, absurdist comedy that was produced in 1997 and attracted the interest of the Manhattan Theater Club, where Proof first received a reading in 1999 and a full production a year later). Exploring the complexities of a father-daughter relationship, sibling conflict, family obligations, the pull of home, the specter of mental illness, and the struggle of women to be taken seriously (not to mention romantic comedy), Proof is far more than a meditation on the link between genius and madness.

		David Auburn will be featured in conversation with Marsha Norman and Christopher Durang on October 22 at Juilliard for the Ovation Society’s first event of the season: A Playwrights Evening. This event is open to Ovation Society members only. For information on becoming a member, please call the Public Affairs Office at (212) 799-5000, ext. 278, or visit our Web site: www.juilliard.edu/ giving/.

Screenwriting exerted a brief pull when Auburn first graduated from the University of Chicago in 1991. He spent a year in Los Angeles on a fellowship from Amblin Entertainment, as one of 10 writers brought each year by Steven Spielberg to Universal Studios. “It was a great year, but when the fellowship ended, I hadn’t sold a script, and I had a pretty clear sense that I’d rather go broke trying to write a play in New York than trying to write a script in L.A.”

Back in New York, he kept discouragement at bay with informal commissions from friends directing at tiny black-box theaters (and poverty with a variety of day jobs). Writing comedy sketches (à la Second City) in college had provided Auburn with a “rough toolbox of techniques,” and two years (1994-96) in Juilliard’s newly established Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program, directed by Christopher Durang and Marsha Norman, provided him with the means to develop “some dramatic chops.” It was the first time Auburn had any professional commentary on his work. “Having writers at that level take your work seriously is validating; it means a lot when you’re starting out,” he explains. “And having actors with Juilliard’s kind of training approach your work, and watching the kinds of questions they ask when they come to a new script, forces you to think seriously about how to shape your material so that actors can get the most out of it. That was also incredibly valuable.” Out of that period came Fifth Planet, which was instrumental in getting Auburn an agent.

Whenever ideas don’t flow freely, Auburn says he doesn’t fret about it. “I don’t expect to feel constantly inspired,” he told the Manhattan Theater Club’s Christian Parker, who moderated a discussion with Auburn for the Dramatists Guild last February. “I generally just try to keep myself stimulated and active. I try to write a little bit everyday, but I also read a great deal.” He might study a foreign language, do things with friends, go to the gym—anything to “stay out there in the world, in the community … so I don’t become a monk.”

Collaborations, in fact, have been at the root of a number of Auburn’s recent projects. He was responsible for fleshing out Jonathan Larson’s script—originally a monologue—into the three-character musical Tick, tick… Boom!, and founded a theater company—the Keen Company—with two friends a year ago (including Carl Forsman as artistic director) that has as its mission the revival of American classics that are “sincere plays”—“plays that have emotional availability, that are straightforward and aim to be noncynical, and that speak to human emotional vulnerability,” explains Auburn. (Keen Company’s warmly reviewed production of John van Druten’s 1943 The Voice of the Turtle is currently playing at the Blue Heron Arts Center.)

Now Auburn is at work on a movie version of Proof, as well as a screenplay based on Scott Anderson’s novel Triage for Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella’s new film company, Mirage Enterprises. “It’s about a war photographer who is traumatized while covering a war in Kurdistan in the early ’90s,” explains Auburn. “He goes back to New York and is unable to function, and there’s a mystery as to what actually happens to him. And he begins to be treated by an eminent doctor who has a secret of his own; he treated fascist officers during the Spanish civil war. The crux of the story is, how reliable is this doctor? He may be a certain kind of war criminal himself. It’s a very interesting moral puzzle.”

Working on a screenplay is, in fact, somewhat like solving a puzzle, says Auburn. “It’s challenging and interesting, especially if you get to work with people you admire. You’re taking someone else’s story material, and you’re trying to find a way to translate it into a completely different medium. Very often, you’re looking for the bones of the story and the relationships under the flesh of the prose that the novelist has placed on top of it… stripping away to the heart of the story, and finding ways to dramatize that in film terms.”

It is the collaborative process that truly interests Auburn. “That’s what’s interesting to me about being a playwright: after you do your own work, you get up from your desk and go into a room full of creative people who add to what you’ve done. And that’s really the fun part. I’m not sure I’d be that interested in it if you never got to interact with anybody else. I wouldn’t be a novelist.”

Jennifer Jason Leigh was scheduled to take over for Mary-Louise Parker in the role of Catherine in Proof on September 11—but the destruction of the World Trade Center brought life in New York City to a halt that day. When the play reopened two nights later with its new cast, Auburn did some deep thinking about the role of the playwright in today’s society. “In the face of everything else that is going on, how important is it that we’re doing this play?” Auburn says he came out of that night with two thoughts: “It’s important for people to keep doing their life’s work, and that’s just as important for people who are in the arts as it is for people who are firemen or politicians. And the other thing I felt, watching the audience—which was surprisingly large that night—was that, even though they had been through this harrowing experience, like everybody else in New York, they wanted to engage with a different set of problems and a fictional set of concerns for two hours. And that they were able to do this, judging from the response, was valuable in some way. It can be troubling to be in show business, because it can feel frivolous or unworthy sometimes. But I think, on some level, the purpose of literature is to show how we speak to ourselves, and to explain ourselves to ourselves. That’s a human function that people have been asking of the theater for thousands of years. Wars and plagues haven’t changed that need of people to enact theater—and that simple fact is enough to remind yourself that there must be something valuable about this.”