Summary
Act 1. Scene 1. 25-year-old Catherine sits in a chair near her father, Robert, a mathematician. Robert asks Catherine why she isn’t sleeping and she tells him it’s because his student is still working in Robert’s study. “He’s not my student anymore. He’s teaching now,” Robert says, and tells her it’s after midnight, before wishing her a happy birthday and presenting her with a bottle of champagne.
“25. I can’t believe it,” Robert says, and Catherine jokes that the last time Robert opened a bottle of champagne he broke a window. When Robert realizes that he forgot glasses, Catherine takes a swig directly from the bottle and says it’s horrible, before noting that it was made in Wisconsin. Robert confronts Catherine about spending her birthday alone, and she reminds him that she has no friends. “What about that cute blonde?” he asks, referring to someone who, Catherine reminds him, she was friends with in third grade, and who moved to Florida in 1983.
“What about Claire?” Robert asks, to which Catherine replies, “She’s not my friend, she’s my sister. And she lives in New York. And I don’t like her.” We learn that Claire is coming to town tomorrow. Robert advises Catherine to do some mathematics. When he reminds her that she used to like it, and that she was a natural mathematician, she tells him she doesn’t have any interest in math anymore. “I realize you’ve had a difficult time,” Robert says, alluding to her depression. He suggests that she knows how many days she’s lost to staying in bed in a depressive state, and she eventually reveals that—yes—she’s been counting, and she’s lost 33 days.
“By the time you were my age you were famous,” Catherine tells her father, alluding to his career as a mathematician. They then talk about the fact that in his 20s, Robert became mentally ill. “The whole world was talking to me,” Robert says, and Catherine asks him how old he was when the illness started. “23, 4,” he tells her. He assures her that mental illness is not simply something that she will inevitably inherit, and that there are a number of factors. “Life changes fast in your early twenties and it shakes you up. You’re feeling down. It’s been a bad week. You’ve had a lousy couple years, no one know that better than me. But you’re gonna be okay,” Robert says, trying to reassure Catherine that she isn’t crazy.
Robert tries to get Catherine to go to bed, but she insists that she cannot trust him, as he just told her that a crazy person would never know they are crazy. It suddenly becomes clear that Robert is not a real person, but a vision, a memory that Catherine is having. Robert died a week earlier, of heart failure. The funeral is tomorrow, and that’s why Claire, Catherine’s sister, is flying in.
As Catherine contemplates the fact that her imagining her father does not bode well for her mental health, Hal, the 28-year-old former student of her father's comes out onto the porch. He apologizes for staying so late, then notices the champagne. She offers for him to take the bottle, but he doesn’t want it. When Hal asks when he should come back, Catherine tells him that the funeral is the next day, and that he’s gotten a lot of time in her father’s study. He tells her he needs another week to help organize the work, but Catherine is indignant. She insists that her father’s work is all gibberish, but Hal isn’t so sure.
Analysis
The play immediately lands the reader in an academic context, where the brilliant but eccentric math professor Robert is celebrating his daughter Catherine’s 25th birthday. Robert is a warm-hearted man, but he is evidently committed to his work first and foremost. Catherine is lonely like her father, but her loneliness seems more self-imposed, and she has to remind her father that “In order for your friends to take you out you generally have to have friends.” The two central characters live in a kind of eccentric solitude, maintaining an affable rapport, but rarely going outside their domestic unit.
Catherine is a true mathematician like her father, always thinking in numbers, but she is stunted in her intellectual potential by the fact that she is also extremely depressive. She spends whole days in bed and only leaves the house to go buy magazines. While Robert says that she used to be a spirited mathematician, now she can barely bring herself to climb out of bed before noon. Thus, we see that a primary conflict in the play is Catherine’s lack of self-belief and her low will to live and care for herself.
No sooner have we learned about Catherine’s past than we learn a little more about Robert. Robert was a famous mathematician by the time he was in his mid-20s, but then fell victim to mental illness, an illness that included delusion. In this moment we see that Catherine and Robert are connected not only in their attachment to mathematics and their brilliant minds, but also in their predisposition for mental illness. Even though Robert insists that he did his best work after he started getting ill, Catherine is not so sure, and worries that his troubles have been more debilitating than he believes.
A rude twist occurs when Catherine realizes that she is not talking to her actual father, but to a vision of him. Her real father died a week earlier, and his funeral is the next day. Suddenly, all of his comforting words become more uncanny, as Catherine realizes that they were all figments of her imagination. Maybe she is crazy, if she’s talking to someone who has died.
Right when Catherine wonders if she’s lost her grip on reality, she runs into Hal, one of her father’s old students, a nerdy mathematician and musician. She is jolted out of her own delusions by someone her age, someone willing to talk to her on a lonely birthday. While her and Hal’s dynamic is not exactly close, they share the memory of Robert, and Hal believes in Catherine’s father’s work, even when she is certain that it is all nonsense.
