Wonder Boys

Image credit: David Auburn: Joan Marcus

IN THE PUDDING Auburn won the Pulitzer for his play ''Proof,'' currently on Broadway starring Mary-Louise Parker

There's another AP photographer at David Auburn's place in Williamstown, Mass. He's early. ''You know, I was gonna take a shower,'' the playwright tells him. Auburn, 31, won his Pulitzer for ''Proof'' (Faber & Faber, $12), a drama currently on Broadway with Mary-Louise Parker in the lead role of a gloomy young math genius.

After a peripatetic apprenticeship (comedy sketches in Chicago, a screenwriting fellowship in L.A., the playwriting program at Juilliard), Auburn hit on the concepts for his first major production in 1999: ''One idea was to write about two sisters fighting about something that had been left behind after their parents' death. The other was about someone worried that they were going to inherit a parent's mental illness. Looking for a way to put them together, I came up with the mathematical background.'' Now he wants to adapt ''Proof'' for the movies. But first he wants to bathe.