For years, Barack and Michelle Obama have built Higher Ground into one of the more quietly influential media companies in the entertainment industry, accumulating award nominations across film, television and podcasting. Now they are taking the company somewhere it has never been before, to the Broadway stage.
The Obamas have announced that Higher Ground will co-produce a revival of Proof, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by David Auburn. It marks the company’s first theatrical production and represents a notable expansion for a brand that has so far operated exclusively in screen and audio formats.
A celebrated play with a rich history
Proof originally debuted on Broadway in 2000 and went on to win the Tony Award for Best Play alongside the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The story follows Catherine, a young woman navigating grief, doubt and discovery in the aftermath of her father’s death. Her father was a brilliant but troubled mathematician, and when Catherine uncovers a notebook containing a potentially groundbreaking proof, questions arise about who truly wrote it and what it reveals about the limits and inheritance of genius.
The play was later adapted into a film featuring Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins, introducing the story to a wider audience. The Broadway revival will be directed by Thomas Kail, a Tony Award winner whose previous work includes the original production of Hamilton. He will produce alongside Mike Bosner and the Obamas through Higher Ground.
A cast making history at the Booth
The production brings together a cast that has generated considerable excitement well before rehearsals began. Don Cheadle and Ayo Edebiri are each set to make their Broadway debuts in the revival, a pairing that alone would make this one of the more anticipated theater openings of the season.
They will be joined by Jin Ha, known to audiences from the acclaimed series Pachinko, and Samira Wiley, who built a devoted following through her work on Orange Is the New Black. The combination of screen-familiar faces and the intimacy of live theater gives the production an energy that feels especially well-suited to a play about inherited brilliance and the courage it takes to claim it.
Previews begin March 31 at the Booth Theatre in New York City, with opening night set for April 16. The run is scheduled for 16 weeks.
Higher Ground’s growing footprint
The Obama’s media company has accumulated a remarkable track record since launching in partnership with Netflix in 2018. Its film and documentary slate includes the Oscar-winning American Factory, the sci-fi thriller Leave the World Behind, Michelle Obama’s documentary Becoming and Rustin, which earned an Academy Award nomination. In total, Higher Ground has earned three Oscar nominations, 12 Emmy nominations with six wins and three Grammy nominations with two wins.
The company’s podcasting network has expanded steadily as well, with titles ranging from Michelle Obama’s conversational series with her brother Craig Robinson to deep-dive music documentaries exploring the legacies of Stevie Wonder and Fela Kuti.
Theater is new territory, but the instinct behind the move feels consistent with everything Higher Ground has done before. Proof is a story about what people leave behind and what others are brave enough to claim as their own. For a company built on the idea that storytelling can shift how people see the world, the fit is hard to argue with.
