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Proof, a Broadway play written by David Auburn and directed by Daniel Sullivan contains some elements related to mental health. Starring Anne Heche, who plays Catherine, a troubled woman in her mid twenties, Proof is about her life adjustment without the support of living parents and her father's legacy of genius and mental illness. As with John Nash in the movie A Beautiful Mind, Catherine's father Robert (Len Cariou), a brilliant, but aging mathematician is dead and buried at the outset of the play. Robert taught Catherine to love math and she loved him very much in turn. Seen in the play during flashbacks when Catherine was his caretaker in their Chicago home, he was troubled by the absence of his mathematical powers. Robert had a mental illness, which took control of his life for many years, making mathematical achievements impossible and life for Catherine very difficult. He was not dangerous, as consumers are so often portrayed, but believed he had to decipher mathematical messages encrypted on the backs of library books. Toward the end of his life, his illness went into remission and at one point he felt his mathematical mind working. He began a proof he never finished, but Catherine finished it in secret. When the proof is discovered no one believes she wrote it. Robert's protégé Hal (Neil Patrick Harris) comes to believe her. He falls for Catherine before she proves to be a mathematical genius and she for him. With the absence of family love, love cautiously develops among strangers.

I was very absorbed with Catherine's restlessness, and her shaking voice with its rapid line delivery. She comes across as very emotionally fragile. One of her major concerns is whether she will develop mental illness like her father.

Catherine's sister Claire (Kate Jennings Grant) wants to take her to New York City to provide her with an apartment and proper mental healthcare.

It is an open-ended play, but I think hopeful because bonds of new love form and Catherine's future in mathematics seems bright. Please see it.