The set designers and crew at the Stone’s Throw Theatre have gone all out for their presentation of the play Proof, by David Auburn.
The audience will be greeted by a two-story home surrounded by a stone walkway, fences and real grass and shrubs — all on the stage at the theater.
“Bryan (Stringer, set designer for this play) and I sat down and I told him what I wanted,” said Vicki Gail Dickey, director of the production. “He brought it alive and created a masterpiece on stage.”
Dickey said Stringer got a hold of some salvaged siding and build the façade of a house, he got fencing and landscaping donated from Coffey Landscaping in Joplin and they got Joplin Lawn and Garden to donate real sod and some bushes for the stage as well. Then they figured out how to put it on stage and keep it alive.
Doug Dickey, Vicki Gail Dickey’s husband and the actor who plays Robert in the four-person play, said the front porch of the home is a deck that was loaned to the production by Chris and Tracy Rogers, Carthage, and as soon as the production is finished, it will be disassembled and installed behind their home.
“The set crew worked seven days a week to get this far with it,” Doug Dickey said on Friday. “We’re still working on it.”
Math and madness
The story is about Catherine, a troubled young woman who has spent years caring for her father, a brilliant and famous mathematician who grew increasingly unstable.
Now, following his death on the eve of her twenty-fifth birthday, she must deal with her own volatile emotions; the arrival of her estranged sister, Claire; and the attentions of Hal, a former student of her father who hopes to find valuable work in the scores of notebooks that her father left behind.
Over the long weekend that follows, a burgeoning romance and the discovery of a mysterious notebook draw Catherine into the most difficult problem of all: How much of her father’s madness — or genius — will she inherit?
The production stars veteran actress Rachel Stanley as Catherine, with Doug Dickey as her father, Robert and Shelley Wilson as her sister, Claire. Mike Smith returns to the stage in his first major role as Hal, the young professor looking for the truth – and maybe a little more.
