Tom Stoppard’s 'Hard Problem' at the Wilma

The play is set on a pristine white stage with the audience on both sides. The actors play to each other instead of the audience, as if they are acting out an experiment before our eyes. Hilary (Sara Gliko) is young and brash and very, very smart. She’s competing against some extremely bright men for a position at the prestigious Krohl Institute for Brain Science. She gets that job and her competition, Amal (Shravan Amin), gets a position with the same company in their hedge fund. Hilary has an arrogant lover, Spike (Ross Beschler); a boss, Leo (Lindsay Smiling), who is fascinated by the “hard problem” of determining when the physical workings of the brain become consciousness; and a protégée, Bo (Jeena Yi), who is torn between science and the desire to please.

A sax symbol

Along the way they discuss a lot of weighty topics, with saxophone music heard whenever Hilary attempts to look beyond science into the great unknown.

For a time, a saxophone was the soundtrack of my life. I lived in a New York City high-rise, far above the mean East Village streets where a sax player stood on the corner and played at all hours of the day and night. So as Michael Pedicin’s mournful saxophone resonates throughout the theater, I’m brought back to a time when I was young and brash and successful in a man’s world of numbers and competition. This saxophone is Hilary’s call to something beyond the sterile white box of thought where she is comfortable, just as it was my grounding in reality and the poverty around my privileged position.

Confusion, not resolution

This is a play of ideas that demands full attention, yet the ideas come at us so rapidly they are never really dealt with at all and lead to confusion rather than resolution. When all problems can be resolved by going off to get a graduate degree in philosophy, one of the more useless degrees in a world driven by money and success, there’s something else going on.

Most plays have a through line — but not this one. Nothing much is at stake for any of the characters. Amal values his $7,000 watch and other trimmings of monetary success, and he’s willing to wear an “Asshole” sign around his neck for two years to keep them. For hedge-fund manager Jerry Krohl (Steven Rishard), there’s the potential loss of money, but he’s a walking cliché of busy-man-on-the-phone.

Hilary experiences — or says she experiences — guilt over “swapping her daughter for a doctorate,” but she doesn’t really grieve the loss, she just wants her daughter to be safe, without having to change what she wants to do with her own life.

What about the body?

Stoppard has created a world in which women are equal to men, and yet. . . .Hilary cries, she prays, she believes in miracles, she has given birth, she even dares to write about God. All of these are forbidden in the world in which she tries to succeed, and eventually she gives up. Her dilemma is reminiscent of the character of Rosalind Franklin in the Lantern Theater Company’s Photograph 51, who also struggled to find her place in the heady world of academia.

Julia (Taysha Canales), on the other hand, is all about the physical side of the equation. She’s a Pilates instructor who keeps her nerd bosses in touch with their bodies, even as they insult her for being less intelligent than themselves.

This intellectual play is being done by the Wilma Theater under the direction of Blanka Zizka, who has just begun her HotHouse resident company to work on the physicality of character development. Perhaps that approach undermines this production — or perhaps it needs more physicality to bring the characters to life.

A late-life look

The Hard Problem is a late-life creation by Stoppard that suffers in comparison to the final work of David Bowie, ten years his junior. Bowie is saying farewell; Stoppard is musing over problems he has mused over for years. But instead of embodying it in people we can relate to, he puts complex ideas into words, and words into the mouths of clichés: the woman who sleeps on a bed made of file boxes; the cigarette-smoking, brilliant, driven Asian protégée; the hedge-fund manager who fits time for his daughter in between phone calls; the Pilates instructor who isn’t smart enough to understand all these brainiacs.

Stoppard isn’t alone in considering these issues. Years ago, in an episode of the sitcom Friends, Phoebe tackled the problem of altruism with much more memorable results, while over at the Walnut Street Theatre Studio Three, A Moon for the Misbegotten, a late life play by Eugene O’Neill, explores life’s meaning through characters we get to know.

Despite structural problems with the play, it’s still a fascinating night of theater. I found myself debating it the next day with other theatergoers: What was the play about, and how could it have been better? Significantly, the debate wasn’t about the ideas of the play but their presentation.

For Carol Rocamora's review of the original London production, click here.