Sometimes I feel like I’m licking at the crumbs of American regionalism. That instead of New Orleans, I get Bourbon St. gone wild; and in place of Seattle, I’m thrown a fish at Pikes Place Market. Beads round my neck and smoked trout on my toast, I resign myself to the fact that the Eisenhower Interstate System killed the back-roads and that sitcoms have reduced dialects to parodies. Every once in a while, however, I’m shaken from this nostalgia pandemic. I realize, yes, the geography of 19th-century America isn’t quite intact, and that’s OK because new regions have emerged and it’s our job to learn how to read them.

I arrived at this realization last night after seeing the second run of the play “Proof” — an introspective drama revolving around a recently deceased mathematician and his long-time daughter/caretaker — which in 2001 won both the Pulitzer and the Tony. The play is considered a quintessentially Chicago play because it captures something of the culture of the University of Chicago, which the playwright, David Auburn, attended and in which the play is set.

I was struck by the way the audience roared with applause whenever the actors hit on little Chicagoisms and how they hissed whenever the one character in town from New York City for the funeral championed the Big Apple over the Windy City. I found myself nodding and smiling, satisfied at these collective outbursts. It felt like an assertion of some new regional identity.

Often Chicago is given the honor of hosting a test run for future Broadway plays. They do a dry run in the Loop, tweak the production, and head East for the main event. The same thing happens with comedians, who learn their craft on the Second City stages and then head west, to the L.A. Studios. I don’t think that was the case with “Proof,” but even so, the play reminds me of the practice and brings to mind what I think of as one of the defining qualities of Chicago. There’s a certain advantage to being in the place where things are test-run. There’s a freedom in it, denied to those on the center stage. When I think of the so-called Chicagoland region, this is what comes to mind.                        

Benjamin Helphand