While making her Broadway debut, Ayo Edebiri is adjusting to the emotional and physical toll of live performance.
The Golden Globe and Emmy winner, who stars as Catherine in Booth Theater’s Thomas Kail-helmed Proof revival, recently recalled a conversation with co-star Jin Ha about the “athleticism to stage acting” required for performing the David Auburn drama eight times a week after 10-hour rehearsals.
“I was like, ‘I don’t understand why I have a pounding headache every day and also why I’m losing weight.’ And he’s like, ‘Well, you’re sort of grieving for work,’” she told People.
In the first ever Proof Broadway revival, which takes its final bow on July 19, Edebiri stars as Catherine, a brilliant but restless daughter of renowned mathematics professor Robert (Don Cheadle) who is thrust into turmoil when a notebook containing a revelatory proof is discovered after his death. As debate with her sister Claire (Adrienne Warren) and her dad’s star student Hal (Jin) erupts over the discovery’s true authorship, Catherine must confront the power of legacy and the cost of proving herself.
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Edebiri added, “A lot of this experience, I’ve been thinking about my physical body versus my emotional body. There’s just such an athleticism to stage acting.
“I had to finish a show and then sit with myself and let my body really intake all of this physical information. Each show is so different because who is in the space and sharing space with us and giving us energy is so different,” she said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, the body keeps the score.’”
Cheadle, who also makes his Broadway debut opposite Edebiri, explained that he’s had a similar experience, “going through this pretend torture every night, but it’s like your endocrine system was doing the same thing.”
Following the show’s 2000 Broadway debut, Proof won a Pulitzer Prize and an Emmy Award, and it was adapted into a John Madden-helmed film starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, Hope Davis and Jake Gyllenhaal.
