“Can I be emotionally naked for an hour and a half in a room full of people who have decided to sit here and focus?” Ayo Edebiri mused.
We’re sitting on the 101st floor at Hudson Yards to discuss her new stage production, Proof on Broadway, as The Bear star pondered how she’ll take on that challenge. Luckily, she’s not taking the plunge alone.
By her side is Don Cheadle, who is also headlining the Broadway revival. While Edebiri has splashed onto the screen in the last few years and Cheadle’s career spans decades, they are both making their Broadway debuts.
Cheadle is aware of the wide range of audiences who will come to see him. But carrying those expectations, he says, would be a mistake.
“To try to take that on would be a trap…my responsibility is to the play and to the text, and to my scene partners… this story is the star,” he said pensively.
In an era obsessed with visibility, his approach feels almost radical: Simply serve the work. Let the story lead. Be present for your castmates.
Edebiri echoed that perspective, describing theater as something communal, less performance at an audience and more an experience built with them.
She said, “It’s a weird sort of team sport… we all get to go on this journey to imagine together.”
She comes from stand-up comedy, where audience interaction can shape the moment in real time, and she sees the stage as equally alive. “The text is… a living, breathing document, and we get to breathe life into those words every night.”
Proof, Explained
At the heart of Proof is the concept of belief: who must fight for it. And in this revival, that sentiment buzzes with new urgency.
This revival is coming to Broadway at a time that feels not just important, but almost prophetic. Edebiri and Cheadle lead the cast as a daughter and father, Catherine and Robert, whose two minds are circling genius, grief, and the bigger question of belief.
After the death of her father, a renowned mathematician, Catherine is left to reckon with his legacy and the discovery of a groundbreaking mathematical proof that raises a more volatile question than the math itself: Who gets credit? Who gets believed? As Catherine defends the authorship, she also confronts a quieter fear: that she may have inherited not just her father’s brilliance, but his instability.
New Cast Brings a Heavier Weight
Written by David Auburn and premiering in May 2000, the play once served as a meditation on genius, doubt, and family. One could almost look at it as a family drama. But with its first Black leading cast on stage, it has a new meaning. The question is no longer just whether she is right… But as a Black woman, will she be believed?
Authorship feels so shaky nowadays. AI can spit out “proofs,” experts get second‑guessed, and “do your own research” is used to justify almost anything. In this world, Catherine’s fight to be believed isn’t theoretical anymore. And when the struggle is embodied by a Black woman, it carries additional weight.
There is a long history of Black intellect being questioned or minimized in terms of brilliance, requiring not just proof, but defense. So when Catherine insists on the validity of her work—her father’s work—she is not just defending a theorem. She is lifting up her own right to be seen, to be trusted, to exist fully in her brilliance. The play’s emotional core reaches past intellect into family, legacy, and inheritance.
With Tony Award-winner Kara Young (Purlie Victorious and Purpose) stepping into the role of Catherine’s sister, the production deepens its resonance. Black sisterhood, with all its tension, tenderness, and truth, becomes part of the story’s fabric: the push and pull of responsibility, the fractures of grief, the quiet return to one another. We’re witnessing lived dynamics that resonate deeply among Black women today.
For Cheadle, embodying Robert, a man both brilliant and unraveling, requires as much discipline and compartmentalization as it does emotion. “You try to jump off the ledge and keep it in a container…You have to know: this is this, and now I’m this,” he said.
It’s a question of stamina and presence in a time when attention spans have shortened tremendously, and the itch to scroll or look elsewhere or move about is almost ever-present. It’s also a question of trust in oneself to accomplish the task at hand.
Resisting “Proof”
When asked whether this play is about proving something to themselves or, perhaps, even to the world, both actors resisted the premise. For Cheadle, the word doesn’t quite fit.
He said, “Challenge is a better word than prove… I’m excited to keep searching… to dig that thing one little groove deeper.”
Edebiri shares that same curiosity and openness to growth. “I’m excited by the challenge… by any opportunity for learning.”
Maybe that’s where Proof finds its deepest resonance now, in pursuit and seeking, because this surely isn’t a story about having all the answers. It is a story about insisting on your voice even when doubt is loud. About navigating all kinds of inheritances: of brilliance, of pain, of expectation, and deciding what you will pick up and carry forward into your future.
At a time when Black women, particularly those who are educated and accomplished, are asked to shrink, this iteration of the 26-year-old production offers something else: a refusal. It offers a reminder that brilliance does not require permission and that rigor still matters. That truth, however contested, is worth standing in.
And that even in the messiness, something undeniable is waiting to be claimed: Belief.
Proof on Broadway opens April 16 at the Booth Theatre in New York City.