The Manhattan Theater Club’s new comedy was performed in the Eureka Day Elementary School library in Berkeley, California, and was attended by wealthy liberals. The colors are bright, the chairs are plastic, and the bookshelves are neatly marked between “Social Justice” and “Fiction.” However, the longer you stare at Todd Rosenthal’s vibrant set, the more you suspect there’s a visual pun going on. What are the eyes full of? Countless spines. what is eureka daytheme? prick. Those who waver with the winds of “awakening,” and those who cling to personal certainties. Bending backwards, performing flexion, or stiffness is where many lumbar vertebrae undergo a stress test. Jonathan Spector’s drama tells the story of a school board divided by vaccine politics, an important learning moment that fails nearly everyone.
Hypocritical liberal farce is nothing new on Broadway. Check out older hits like god of killing or updated fares, e.g. thanksgiving drama It can be said that the dramatist peeled off the KN95 mask of politeness to reveal the curled lips of contempt. Unlike his earlier work, Specter gave his characters more humanity and complexity. But is that enough for us to care? After November, the idea of center-left professionals from California speaking for the country has been depressingly abandoned. Recent events both amplify and diminish this clever comedy. From the debate in the first scene about which racial categories should be included in the drop-down menu (“transracial adoptees”?!), we know these types: Coastal elites who give up with a straight face on “holding space” and “others” . As the story unfolds, Spector develops some of the arcs that give his computer comics depth: grievous pain, real parental tragedy. Although eureka day Premiered in New York five years ago. Today, post-COVID and pre-Trump II, audiences may look at 2018 with almost wistfulness.
Let me introduce the motherboard. First there’s Don (Bill Owen), an affable principal who strives to be inclusive of all viewpoints. Not to kill my “spine” ego from above, but one might be reminded of Irving’s Mr. Crooked in Mr. Noodles. sesame street. Like the wavering young man, Don was wavered by false anxiety, hesitant to reach consensus. Susanna (Jessica Hecht) lets all her children spend Eureka Day and displays her superior morals like a dragon lady who symbolizes virtue. Super Karen Suzanne thinks black lesbian Karina (Amber Gray) only pays half of her kids’ school fees — a microaggression that ends up coming back to bite her. Rich and crafty tech bro Eli (Thomas Middleditch) and shy single mom Plum (Chelsea Jakula-Kurta) fill out the boardroom — oh, and have an affair, too. This is progressive: Eli and his wife agree to an open marriage. What could possibly go wrong? Mumps. Meiko’s daughter passes the virus to Eli’s son during a “play date,” and an epidemic quickly closes the school.
Instead of reasonably effective containment of the disease, the emergency has divided communities between pro- and anti-vaxxers. It turns out that a significant number of Eureka Day parents distrust Big Pharma, and they passionately defended this crunchy granola stance in a “Community Activation Conversation,” which marked the show’s comic high point. As Don and the board host a Facebook Live town hall to discuss whether to mandate student vaccinations, parallel conversations unfold in the chat room, and we see parents projecting sarcastic, increasingly vicious and hateful insults onto the set.
As a dramatist, Spector possesses a wealth of skills: He sketches each character with a satirist’s unsparing eye, animated by sudden flashes of compassion. On Eureka Day, Don declared, “We will not turn our children into villains,” and he included the board in this pledge. Even so, you might start to think anti-vaxxer Suzanne is a heavy-handed person, but Spector subverts that expectation with a chilling monologue that Hecht delivers with her gift for spontaneous, shaky honesty. This is a chilling monologue. The entire team, under the steadfast direction of director Anna D. Shapiro, delivers stellar performances as they descend into hilarious situations of bureaucracy and moral crisis. Eventually, a consensus was reached and the community was healed—but not without a sacrificial lamb. I left the Friedman Theater feeling both amused and disturbed: If a group of intelligent, morally upstanding citizens descends into chaos, what hope does a nation of ill-educated people have? No germ spreads as quickly as stupid people.
eureka day | 1 hour and 40 minutes without intermission. | Samuel L. Friedman Theater | Samuel L. Friedman Theater 261 West 47th Street | 212-239-6200 | Buy tickets here
