In the school library of Eureka Day, a beyond-liberal California elementary school, a “Community Activated Conversation” is underway. There has been an outbreak of mumps, and the school’s board of directors are having an open meeting—the directors in the school library, many parents online listening and typing—to figure out what to do.
Insist on vaccinations for all? Allow some parents/children to opt out? How to institute the quarantine local health officials are insisting on? A healthy, robust exchange of views, they hope, will lead to consensus.
They wish. What actually unfolds in this scene in Eureka Day (Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, booking to Jan. 19)—written by Jonathan Spector, directed by Anna D. Shapiro, and mounted by Manhattan Theatre Club—is one of the cleverest, best-written, and funniest scenes on Broadway this year.
As board head Don (Bill Irwin) tries to marshal the views in the room, while keeping an eye on the screen, there is an epic online meltdown as parents engage in ideological combat, snark, and vicious personal takedowns.
This we see unfolding as a livestream in real time on a screen—with accusations of murder, offers of free yoga tuition, and invocations of Nazi Germany—in front of us. It isn’t just the insults; as passions inflame, one user, “Leslie Kaufman,” simply adds a thumbs-up emoji at sporadic moments, until providing a brilliant emoji payoff at the climax of the transfixing conflagration.
Eureka Day starts in the philosophical vein of The Thanksgiving Play, at first seeming to be a witty, if dated, satire skewering various liberal purities and pieties around race, class, language, identity, and money.
The play is set in 2018, yet feels joltingly current, especially as noted vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues his ascent to perhaps becoming Health Secretary in the second Trump administration—and as diversity, inclusion, and equality policies and initiatives are under sustained attack.
At Eureka High, all-gender bathrooms are being constructed. In Todd Rosenthal’s airy school library are posters loudly proclaiming about diversity and equality, one stating: “Berkeley Stands United Against Hate.” We hear about a school production of Peter Pan, which as one character puts it, “aside from the extremely problematic portrayal of Native Peoples, there’s actually a whole host of Colonialist Issues in terms of the content that I for one had been completely blind to.”
As the play opens, the adults tellingly sitting on the chairs children sit on, the first issue of debate for the board is around the drop-down menu of ethnic identities for potential parents. All are listed. There is much talk of all viewpoints being respected, everyone’s child being of value, of not infringing on any rights to say and believe anything.
In a cast with crackling chemistry and sharp comic chops, Don tries to keep the peace as people talk over one another, trying to ignore and sidestep all the hot-button issues landing at his feet like booby-trapped turds.
Around him are new board member Carina (Hadestown’s Amber Gray), who seeks to ensure her voice is heard and presence felt, Suzanne (Jessica Hecht), whose ethereal exterior hides a steely ruthlessness, the not-as-sheepish-as-he-seems tech bro Eli (Thomas Middleditch), and single mom Meiko (Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz), all futilely trying to arrive at consensus around the vaccination issue.
There are some hidden complications—a not-so-secret affair between two characters, the educational needs of one child, the illness of another, and the death of another—that add an edge to the frequently very funny linguistic and philosophical soup that Spector concocts.
The play also shows the amount of lip-service to liberalism many of the characters pay—we see glints of real racism in assumptions made about Carina’s circumstances (Gray shows us that Carina has heard so much of the same before), and in how Eli is perceived (a ruffle-haired peacekeeper) versus the reality (someone who is very rich, and who has hidden reservoirs of influence to get things done as he wishes at the school and in his private life).
Hecht’s skillful switching of character—woo-woo hippiness to calculating operator—is like the beating heart of the school itself: all smiles and inclusivity on the outside, while the internal workings are governed by ideological power plays and financial muscle.
Suzanne’s central belief of what the school should hold true to—“I may not agree with your Point of View but I deeply respect your right to hold that Point of View”—is revealed to be a canard, because, as Carina says, when it comes to what science says, and what scientists advise trumps individual belief, especially when it comes to keeping children safe, and a school’s responsibility to keep a student population safe.
The bravura-written and displayed livestream fight between the parents is worth the price of admission; Spector crafting some all-too ghoulishly believable lines of anger, bitchiness, and dumb backchat. “Protect your children by EDUCATING YOURSELVES,” one user says. “Or, Protect your children by VACCINATING THEM.”
And: “Actually chiropractors have way more hours of schooling in anatomy than Western doctors.”
“My dog has way more hours in sniffing s--t than Western doctors, that doesn’t make him a Proctologist.”
“What do stupid people and dead people have in common? The dead people don’t know they’re dead either!”
The responses from our audience seemed to reveal which side they were on, as well as the play itself—not the vaccine skeptics. Yet Spector and the excellent Hecht give Suzanne enough of a grounding in pained, personal reality to add a dark edge to her argument. The play also reveals what Carina must labor under to get her voice heard and understood in a group which may prize listening, but only to their own voices, with very limited knowledge and sensitivity when it comes to other cultural groups—whatever the books they claim to cherish, and right-on posters they stick on library walls.
Eureka Day ends with a call to looking ahead to a hopefully less vexed 2020, the characters on stage not yet aware that all the debates around vaccination, public safety, and herd immunity are only about to ratchet up a thousand times more.
And now, with the possible confirmation of RFK Jr. as Health Secretary, vaccine skepticism and a whole lot more may soon flow into the mainstream from an uncontested bully pulpit.
Eureka Day is extremely funny for sure, but in choosing to ridicule liberals’ overzealousness it also feels antiquated—its 2018 target a comparatively unthreatening sheep when viewed in light of what may soon come to the fore in the public arena. Will dramatists find a way to write just as waspishly and unsparingly about those new overlords?
