It's almost as if Tom Stoppard has been touched by an angel, and that Della Reese is hovering about ready to put some heavenly coincidences into motion. One precept repeated in The Hard Problem is that there are no real coincidences, only situations where we don't have all the information. Divine intervention could be one explanation for unexpected convergences, but so could factors that may be as small as the flap of a butterfly's wings halfway around the globe.
Existential questions have been at or near the heart of most of Stoppard's plays, dating back as far as 1966 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Thanks to his long association with ACT's Artistic Director Carey Perloff, many of those plays have been produced at the Geary Theater, where The Hard Problem is now having its West Coast premiere. It's Stoppard's first full-length play in a decade, and while its essence is of familiar intellectual muscularity, a notion of a beneficent, responsive God is frequently invoked.
At the center of the play is the question of mind versus brain, whether human kindness innately exists or is the result of hard-wired responses rooted in survival instincts. That's a debate that doesn't necessarily need God in it, but the play's central and most sympathetic character believes both that consciousness can be altruistic independent of Darwinian controls, and that praying to God just might get you what you ask for. Not a created-the-world-in-six-days kind of God, but some kind of higher moral intelligence who takes requests.
Psychology scholar Hilary kneels at her bedside every evening in silent prayer, something an unpleasantly clever lover named, appropriately, Spike finds ridiculous. When she lands a job at a prestigious institute for brain science, her research adheres to empirical data, but she can't help herself from presenting a paper making a case for God's existence, something that prompts tut-tuts from her colleagues. And then it's back to hard-core data leading to a seeming breakthrough in behavioral studies before we're again knocking on heaven's door as God grants, or so Hilary believes, her most ardent prayer. Whether or not God is necessary for altruism is not among the hard questions that Stoppard tries to answer.
The play does provide good mental exercises as the characters debate the nature of thought. One tidier example: Can a computer be said to be actually thinking when it plays chess? Not until it feels bad when it loses. Stoppard provides hefty ammunition to all sides in whatever discussions are at hand, but ultimately his sympathies seem to align with Hilary's more benign take on human nature. Her arguments don't necessarily win the day �" unless you chalk up a life-changing coincidence to divine intervention �" but she is the one character that warrants a fuller investment.
Brenda Meaney pays off that investment by creating a character who is smart, vulnerable, and actually likeable. Not that all the other characters are unlikeable, but they aren't developed enough to earn much of an emotional connection. Some of the characters feel little more than ornamental, like a lesbian couple played by Stacy Ross and Safiya Fredericks, while others exist to provide Hilary with debating partners, including her prickly sometimes-lover (Dan Clegg), a bitter researcher she beats out for a job (Vandit Bhatt), a too-eager assistant (Narea Kang), and a genial supervisor (Anthony Fusco). In a more faceted role, Mike Ryan brings a strong presence as a ruthless financier with a soft side as a philanthropist and a father.
Director Carey Perloff's production starts off stiffly in a post-coital scene between Hilary and Spike, with Clegg's substitution of declamation for projection skewing early rhythms. If sharpness remains elusive in the staging, spread out on Andrew Boyce's austere high-tech set, it loosens into more natural patterns as it proceeds. The ultimate issues with The Hard Problem are not in the production but in the play itself, one that finds Stoppard opting for squishy equivocation in a play that teases us with hard answers.
The Hard Problem will run through Nov. 13 at the Geary Theater. Tickets are $20-$105. Call (415) 749-2228 or go to act-sf.org.