Tom Stoppard gets his playwriting challenges and kicks from dealing with hard problems. The latest is The Hard Problem, which opened in January 2015 at London’s National Theatre and bows now at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse. (Was there a hard problem holding up the import for almost four years?)
The most notable previous example of Stoppard’s hard-problem consideration is Arcadia, which many partisans consider his best work and in which the hard problem mooted is Fermat’s Theorem. That’s the one where a long-term mathematical puzzle (apparently proved after Stoppard kidded with it) is discussed as characters from two timeframes live their complicated and intertwined emotional lives.
Stoppard’s new hard problem was defined by Australian philosopher David Chalmers. It concerns proving “the mystery of consciousness,” obviously a subject that occupied voracious reader Stoppard’s consciousness the instant the conundrum came to his attention.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★★★ review here.]
He introduces determined Hilary (Adelaide Clemens), who’s seen first as a graduate student in a continuing argument with her mentor, the aptly-named Spike (Chris O’Shea). He’s a scientist who believes only what he finds empirically provable. So he dismisses everything Hilary—who nonetheless becomes a temporary romantic partner for him—has to say not only about consciousness (separate from brain activity) but also about altruism, coincidence, the reality or illusion of goodness, and religious beliefs.
Spike has plenty to dismiss, too, as, for one thing, he catches Hilary praying one night. This is a ritual for which he has no sympathy. Hilary’s prayers, however, are in hope of one day learning the whereabouts of her daughter Catherine, whom she had when she was 15 and gave up for adoption.
Likely brilliant at her career pursuits, Hilary is hired for an important position at the Krohl Institute for Brain Science but in a division apart from the main focus: as the name states, the brain. The man running her consciousness-oriented area, which operates on tenterhooks, is Leo (Robert Petkoff). The institute founder is moneybags Jerry (Jon Tenney), who is father to an adopted daughter named Cathy (Katie Beth Hall).
Anyone reading this shouldn’t jump to any conclusions. Hold on. Maybe jumping to conclusions is exactly what Stoppard wants audience members to do—and with intellectual fervor and accompanying amusement. The constant talk about hard problems and other problems—the existence of altruism, the inevitability of coincidence—carries on as Hilary and the others in her tightening sphere exhibit their abiding consciousness, their altruistic impulses and the coincidences that crowd their lives.
As coincidences go, yes, there’s Jerry raising the typically engaging Cathy, but that’s hardly the end of it. Hilary’s devoted assistant Bo (Karoline Xu) is dating Amal (Eshan Bajpay), whom Hilary beat out for the Krohl Institute slot. Julia (Nina Grollman), a member of Hilary’s teenage girl gang, shows up out of the blue and is living with Krohl colleague Ursula (Tara Summers). Want more? Years after their affair, Hilary encounters Spike at a Venice conference, where in a sumptuous Venice bedroom they rekindle the fling, if only for a night.
The wonderful result of Stoppard’s insisting in The Hard Problem that his audiences think seriously as they watch his play are the simultaneous emotional feelings he elicits in them. He allows no let-up in brain and consciousness awareness but makes certain that humanity accompanies, if not predominates, the effect.
This wasn’t always the case with Stoppard. Starting with the reputation he earned on his first success, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, he’s always been regarded as brilliant and witty, but that’s where he ended. It could be argued that only with the above-mentioned Arcadia did he add strong emotional ingredients. (Curiously, his remarkable humor remains evident in his later works but noticeably less so.)
Jack O’Brien, who to some extent has been Stoppard’s director of choice for New York City productions, is at the helm again and does his usual sensitive job. He puts his stamp on the proceedings by not imposing a stamp but simply bringing to fruition everything already on the page. And where Stoppard is in play, so to speak, those pages overflow with ideas and attitudes.
As Hilary, Clemens has the most to do and does it with the urgency of a woman whose mind is as full of Stoppard-like notions as her 28-year-old life has been marked by its share of troubles. The other players exhibit the sleek acting panache that O’Brien and the script demand.
There is a staging element that viewers might find questionable. The busy and always stylish designer David Rockwell (is this his third set in as many months?) has provided something sparer than he usually does—perhaps as dictated by the several locales covered. (Did he design the white plastic chairs with tree-branch-like backs that populate Krohl cubicles? Who wouldn’t covet one of those?)
The furniture from scene to scene is moved by the actors in the focal roles, but there are six other members of the ensemble(all in costumer Catherine Zuber’s business outfits) bringing on and removing pieces. The members of this sextet also spend stretches watching the play.
It may be that their assignments have the ability to invite patrons to watch them and think about their servile assignments rather than keep focus where it ought to be: on the irony Stoppard is having his heady time dispensing as he raises some of humankind’s most unanswerable questions and offers a few enticing answers of his own.
The Hard Problem opened November 19, 2018, at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse and runs to January 6, 2019. Tickets and information: lct.org
