Don Cheadle was not itching to return to the theater, where he last appeared 25 years ago in the Off Broadway premiere of Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog.” With numerous TV and film commitments — including multiple turns as a Marvel superhero — the theater, he said, “just was never on my radar.”
Another sticking point: the time commitment. “I was kind of not thinking about being here,” in New York, “for four months or five months,” said Cheadle, who lives in Santa Monica. “I couldn’t get my head around it.”
But sometimes it’s only that the right factors have yet to align, like when the award-winning director of “Hamilton” (Thomas Kail) comes calling, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “Proof” (David Auburn) wants you for a revival of his canonical work and you are told you’ll be performing opposite Ayo Edebiri, an Emmy-winning star of “The Bear.”
“I’m just a fan of her talent,” Cheadle, 61, said of Edebiri, 30. “She’s very funny and dramatic, has a lot of range, and has a dark and wry sense of humor. And I just thought, this play is traditionally not a Black family, and thinking about playing her father, and what that dynamic would be like, it just made sense.”
And so Cheadle is making his Broadway debut alongside Edebiri, who’s also making hers, in Kail’s revival of “Proof” at the Booth Theater. She’s Catherine, a 25-year-old in Chicago grieving the death of her father, Cheadle’s Robert, a brilliant mathematics professor who struggled with madness. Catherine also seems to be showing signs of the same debilitating mental illness that afflicted her father — or is she? That is one of the questions raised in a story that, with an African American family now at its center, is playing a little differently 25 years after it won the Tony Award for best play.
