Friday, November 23, 2018
Why Jack O'Brien Always Looks for the Emotional Core in Tom Stoppard
Theatre Development Fund – TDF: Parsing the nature of consciousness sounds like a subject for a research think tank, not an Off-Broadway show. But Tom Stoppard has spent his 50-year career crafting dazzling intellectual plays (Travesties, Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia) that distill a wide range of complex topics into witty and stimulating theatre. The 81-year-old British dramatist's latest offering is The Hard Problem at Lincoln Center Theater, about Hilary (Adelaide Clemens), a young research assistant at a neuroscience lab who challenges the establishment orthodoxy that human nature can be completely explained through science. The narrative interweaves mathematical game theory, Darwinian survival, the behavior of the financial markets and the question of the existence of God in an effort to crack the equation of what makes us human.
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I have relatively limited knowledge of and experience with Stoppard’s plays, but I was intrigued by this article because the one thing that prominently stands out in my memory of his work is their intellectual insistence. My school put on a production of Arcadia a few years ago, and while I didn’t work on the show, I made sure to read it ahead of time and watch it on opening night. Given that it was a school play (not as delicately directed as Jack O’Brien’s productions by a long shot), the scary SAT words, seemingly alien British commonalities, and monotonous scientific dilemmas were a complete mask to any underlying emotional depth that the plot might have offered. In retrospect, I think this turned me off to similar work because they felt inaccessible to me. The cerebral nature of the characters’ lives and problems felt unrelatable and intangible to my simple audience understanding. I would be very interested to see the practical ways in which O’Brien draws out the emotional vibrancy from this kind of work of Stoppard’s.
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