The Hard Problem, the latest full-length play by Tom Stoppard, began rehearsals this week in the LCT ballet room. Among its many resonant subjects are math and the brain. So it was fitting that at this week’s meet-and-greet preceding the first rehearsal there was a brief moment in which Andre Bishop, LCT’s producing artistic director, and Jack O’Brien, the director of the Stoppard work, racked their brains to determine whether The Hard Problem represented the fourth LCT collaboration between O’Brien and Stoppard or the sixth. The number turns on whether Stoppard’s trilogy The Coast of Utopia, which won a record seven Tony awards in 2007, counts as one epic work or as three. No definitive answer was settled. (The other collaborations were Hapgood and The Invention of Love.)
Normally, I wouldn’t go on about the standard aspects of a meet-and-greet: the actors and staff introduce themselves and the producing artistic director, writer, and director make brief remarks. But a collaboration as fruitful as this one demands slight expansion. In his remarks, O’Brien put it best: “This is not our first rodeo, Tom and mine. We have evolved a rather interesting way or working together over the years. We really do work together. I learned early that for those of you who are about to have this experience: what is the point of doing a Tom Stoppard play without hearing from Tom Stoppard? So we give our notes together, which I find exhilarating and amusing.”
From the collaboration, O’Brien said, he’s learned most of all “the value of the word. And the reason I say this is that it has influenced everything I feel about this play.”
Stoppard’s plays sometimes are reduced to a single topic: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is about Hamlet, The Real Thing is about romantic illusion, The Coast of Utopia is about 19th-century Russian intellectuals. O’Brien countered: “Tom never writes a play about one thing, so far as I know. There may be a title and a field of interest but a lot of layers, as in Troy, sift down in the play. Some of which we have to dig out and emphasize and most of which are implicit in the value of the word.”
At a meet-and-greet there is customarily a presentation, by use of models and sketches, of the production’s set and costumes. This week, that didn’t happen. I won’t tell you why, or give away specific details of the show’s look. All I will share is what O’Brien said in general: “I don’t want the audience to be distracted by ornamentation, when the ornamentation is in the text itself.”
Speaking after O’Brien, Stoppard was a model of the unornamented. He said he was “in a mode of gratitude, mainly. And of excitement as to what we’ll get to in the next days and weeks.”
Brendan Lemon is the editor of lemonwade.com
