David Auburn is best known for his 2001 play Proof, which not only won the Tony Award for Best New Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama but had the distinction of being the longest-running straight play on Broadway in two decades. The story about the daughter of a brilliant and troubled mathematician dealing with his passing closed in 2003 after 918 performances. However, Auburn’s decades-long career goes far beyond Proof; his body of work includes short plays, monologue collections, and films.
Auburn was born in Chicago and spent his childhood in Ohio and Arizona before returning to Illinois to study English literature at the University of Chicago. While there, he began writing as a member of Off-Off Campus, a student sketch comedy group. “The sketches kind of gradually got longer and longer,” he remembers, “and pretty soon I had written a play.”
The summer after his sophomore year, Auburn turned down a position in a Senator’s office to join his theatre troupe at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. After graduating, he won a Stephen Spielberg fellowship for screenplay writing in Los Angeles, then moved to New York to focus on writing for theatre. He attended Juilliard’s two-year playwriting program, where he studied under Marsha Norman and Christopher Durang.
True to his sketch comedy beginnings, Auburn has written several short comedies which were produced together in 2008 under the title Fifth Planet and Other Plays. The pieces were called “cockeyed and engaging little one-act comedies,” and one, “What Do You Believe About The Future?,” was adapted for the screen.
Auburn’s full-length pieces include Skyscraper (1997), a play about a group trying to save a historic Chicago building; The Columnist (2012), a drama about an American journalist working during the Cold War; Lost Lake (2014), a reflective drama about two adults meeting at a lake house; and Summer, 1976 (2023); each of which had a New York run. Auburn works in adaptation as well—in 2005, he adapted The Journals of Mihail Sebastian into a one-man show that spans eight years in the life of a young writer in Bucharest during the Second World War. Auburn also adapted Langdon Mitchell’s 1908 play The New York Idea, a comedy about a 1906 divorcee—according to Entertainment Weekly, he “essentially rebuilt it from the ground up.” In 2001, Auburn adapted Jonathan Larson’s original drafts into the three-person musical Tick, Tick... BOOM!
Beyond theatre, Auburn adapted the script of Proof into a screenplay and wrote the films The Lake House, Georgetown, and The Girl in the Park, the last of which he also directed. He wrote the story for the 2019 Charlie’s Angels starring Kristen Stewart, Naomi Scott, and Ella Balinska.
Although his writing moves between genres and mediums, Auburn notes that “the thing that keeps on coming up is the relationships between and roles of parents and children.... whether I intend it or not.” Proof focuses on the effect parents have on their children, while Summer, 1976, shows how children change their parents’ lives. In both pieces, Auburn’s tone is as varied as his body of work. “In any human situation there is the potential for humor and pathos, both,” he says. “I like stories that surprise you with sudden shifts of mood or tone, so that as an audience member you never quite settle into complacency.”
—Nora Geffen