‘The Hard Problem’ is full of problems

Like every play in his decades-long oeuvre, the latest from multiple Tony winner Tom Stoppard makes you think.

But unlike many of his other works, which include “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Arcadia” and “The Real Thing,” “The Hard Problem,” whose West Coast premiere opened Wednesday, Oct. 26, at ACT, might make you question whether you want to think, or at least think along with the people he’s created.

It’s not that the ideas the drama explores, as it follows the budding career of Hilary (Brenda Meaney), a young psychologist, aren’t endlessly fascinating. It asks whether altruism can ever spring from a pure desire to do good or whether there’s always, ultimately, some self-serving, if subconscious and biological, aim.

It delves deeply into the so-called hard problem, or how the material of the brain can give rise to immaterial consciousness, including complex feelings like sorrow that separate humans from other animals. It also explores how social scientists construct experiments to free themselves of bias; how a scientist might reconcile her career with her belief in God; and, finally, how a hedge fund operates.

If that last one sounds out of place, that’s a classic Stoppard humanist impulse, part of the life-affirming magic of his writing. In weaving together disparate areas of study, he reveals the universe as more wondrous, connected, complex than we might typically give it credit for.

Here, though, the foray into hedge fund mechanics feels as lifeless as a sidebar in a textbook, and many of the performers deliver their lines pedantically, as if afraid we won’t be able to follow along.

From the start, Stoppard’s characters don’t compel. It’s difficult to stomach the sexism of Spike (Dan Clegg), not just in the things he says to Hilary — he compares her brain to a “party balloon” — but in the very structure of their situation. As the play begins, he’s her 30-year-old tutor at Loughborough University, in England, and she’s his 22-year-old student. They’re also lovers, of course, even as he insults her math skills, her approach to the question of consciousness, her belief in God.

The play never allows her, or any of the other smart women repeatedly demeaned in the play, to give a meaningful response. Hilary’s given a quip now and then, and these withering moments are Meaney’s finest in the show, but mostly the play’s women are forced to sit quietly and endure treatment that should merit defense or departure.

“The Hard Problem” is a string of nonevents. You never actually see Hilary and Spike fall for each other, or Leo (Anthony Fusco), Hilary’s supervisor at a brain science institute, make a pass at her; they all just talk about it after the fact, and then, under the direction of Carey Perloff, the actors shrug things off as if they’d hit the reset button at the end of a sitcom episode. But stakes don’t even get 22 minutes to build; intentions behind lines dwindle before they’ve even fully left actors’ lips.

Tellingly, one scene centers on Hilary burning dinner at a party; it’s like an episode of “The Donna Reed Show,” but instead of wholesome family antics, the discussion centers on denigrating Julia (Safiya Fredericks) because she’s a Pilates instructor and doesn’t have a doctorate. Stoppard’s characters here are less fleshed-out human beings than mouthpieces and sounding boards — and, repugnantly, which actors play mouthpieces and which sounding boards tend to fall along race lines.

Some scenes don’t even have interesting ideas. One with Jerry (Mike Ryan), a tycoon; Amal (Vandit Bhatt), his employee; and later Cathy (Carmen Steele), Jerry’s daughter, flounders so painfully — it’s first a forced, David Mamet-lite confrontation between the men, then an aimless string of banalities between father and daughter — that you fear the performers might break character in order to escape.

The whole scene feels as arbitrary as Andrew Boyce’s set design. Why, why are there two giant trees soaring out of its sleek, office-park-ready lines? If it’s to contrast the mysteries of pulsating life with the coldness of a lab, this production would have done well to give its characters a stronger heartbeat.

The Hard Problem: By Tom Stoppard. Directed by Carey Perloff. Through Nov. 13. 100 minutes. $20-$105, subject to change. ACT’s Geary Theater, 415 Geary St., S.F. (415) 749-2228. www.act-sf.org

To see a video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg8f80-QGHg