Tarra Gaines

Somewhere near the end of the first act of Stages’ sweet and nostalgic production of the classic musical The Fantasticks when a happy ending tableau had arrived but an entire second act still remained to follow, I couldn’t stop thinking of that likely-apocryphal story about the cosmologist confronting a turtle infinity.

As that infamous theatrical adage goes: dying is easy; comedy is hard.

In one of his most recent works, The Hard Problem, getting its regional premiere at Main Street Theater (through Oct. 6), Stoppard goes in heavy on the head, rather literally as the play follows scientists looking into questions of how the brain creates the mind, how we are conscious of our own consciousness.