Skip to main content
For a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life, Seven thousand five hundred dollars ($7,500).

Proof, by David Auburn

Columbia University President George Rupp (left) presents David Auburn with the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Winning Work

Proof

Proof is the story of an enigmatic young woman, Catherine, her manipulative sister, their brilliant father, and an unexpected suitor.

They are all pieces of the puzzle in the search for the truth behind a mysterious mathematical proof.

In Proof, the young but guarded Catherine grieves over the loss of her father, a famous mathematician who had become a legend at the local university for solving complicated proofs, and for suffering from dementia. Just as Catherine begins to give in to her fear that she, too, might suffer from her father’s condition, Catherine’s older sister Claire returns home to help “settle” family affairs and Hal, one of the father’s old students, starts to poke around the house.What Hal discovers in an old speckle-bound notebook brings to light a buried family secret.

It tests the sisters’ kinship as well as the romantic feelings growing between Catherine and Hal.

This poignant drama about love and reconciliation unfolds on the back porch of a house settled in a suburban university town, that is, like David Auburn’s writing, both simple and elegant.

Biography

David Auburn's play Proof premiered at the Manhattan Theatre Club in May 2000, and opened at Broadway's Walter Kerr Theatre on October 24, 2000. He is the recipient of the Guggenheim Foundation Grant, Helen Merrill Playwrighting Award, and Joseph Kesselring Prize for Drama.

His other plays include: Skyscraper, performed at the Greenwich House and published by DPS; Fifth Planet, New York Stage and Film; Miss You, HBO Comedy Arts Festival; and The Next Life, Juilliard School. His work has been published in Harpers Magazine and The New England Review. He was a member of the Juilliard playwrighting program.

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Drama in 2001:

The Jury

Linda Winer(chair )

drama critic

Mel Gussow

culture writer

Michael Phillips

drama critic

Hedy Weiss

drama critic

Edwin Wilson

professor of theater

Winners in Drama

2001 Prize Winners

David Cay Johnston

For his penetrating and enterprising reporting that exposed loopholes and inequities in the U.S. tax code, which was instrumental in bringing about reforms.

Staff

For its balanced and gripping on-the-scene coverage of the pre-dawn raid by federal agents that took the Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez from his Miami relatives and reunited him with his Cuban father.