It’s hard to believe that Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day, a needle-sharp comedy that opened Monday at Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, was first performed in those halcyon pre-pandemic days of 2018. The play, which has been updated in the years since its premiere, aptly premiered in Berkeley, California, which is also the setting for this pointed puncturing of liberal pieties. Five grown-ups gather in the library of a private elementary school, members of an advisory council that debates important issues like how many racial/ethnic categories to include in the school’s application form and how they should be phrased (“First Nations comma Indigenous and Aboriginal comma Native American Heritage”).
The well-meaning but ineffectual group is so concerned about the language of inclusion and the performative aspects of toeing the line of their Core Operating Principles that they are ill-equipped when a genuine crisis erupts: a mumps outbreak fueled by the fact that many of the parents are vehemently opposed to vaccination.
The group is nominally led by the Rumi-quoting head of the school (Bill Irwin), whose perpetual state of Zen unflappability becomes increasingly flapped as the play progresses. But the real leader is Jessica Hecht’s Suzanne, a longtime parent who treats community and consensus-building as a religion despite her desperate need to control every outcome. She soon finds herself in conflict with Carina (Amber Gray), the first Black woman in the group and a newcomer who arrived with her wife and son from the East Coast, as well as with Eli (Thomas Middleditch, playing a variation on his Silicon Valley character), a self-described “full-time dad” who has a tendency to mansplain and cut others off mid-thought. Eli is also having a not-so-secret affair with Meiko (Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz), a wallflower who spends most of the meeting time knitting instead of engaging in the issue at hand.
Performative liberalism offers an orchard of low-hanging fruit for Spector to splice up, and it’s fun to watch these well-meaning, mostly white folks pretzel themselves into self-serving contradictions while spouting idealistic values. (Hecht, with her fluttery woo-woo voice, perfectly captures her character’s hippie hypocrisy.) These folks aren’t so much virtue signaling as waving airliners into their gates. Director Anna D. Shapiro does a remarkable job establishing these characters before the action escalates to an epic, side-splitting Zoom meeting with the school community over the Health Department’s quarantining of the school due to those mumps cases.
That scene — in which the parents’ real-time comments appear in text windows projected onto the back wall of Todd Rosenthal’s evocative set while the council members bicker among themselves — is the hilarious highlight of the show. You may have a hard time hearing what the onstage actors are saying given the loud gales of laughter from the audience reading the text bubbles of increasingly chaotic self-interest, obtuseness, what-aboutism, and eventual petty name-calling. (“Ding ding ding! We have a winner! First Nazi reference,” one blurb reads.) The scene perfectly captures the frustrating political divide that we all too often find online or in Zoom calls with colleagues or family — how even well-meaning folks can devolve into agents of incivility.
At the root of the humor, though, are genuine issues about not only the politics of vaccination but also the larger issue of collective responsibility and how to balance individual choice with community safety. Spector’s writing also becomes more nuanced in the final third, as the school faces a series of crises of its own making — including the prospect of financial collapse if enough parents on one side or the other of the mandatory vaccination question withdraw their kids (and tuition dollars). And the characters, Hecht’s Suzanne and Gray’s Carina in particular, emerge as more rounded individuals whose convictions have a deeper rationale than mere allegiance to some ideology. Gray projects the self-assurance and forbearance of a woman who’s accustomed to being the only nonwhite person in a room, while Hecht nails the solipsism of a card-carrying liberal who desperately wants to be an ally without shedding an ounce of her privilege. The two actresses play off each other with exquisite timing — showing restraint and humility even as their conflict threatens to escalate into rank dissension.
Eureka Day‘s ending may not match the hilarity of that Zoom meeting, but it offers a satisfying button on a well-crafted show.
EUREKA DAY
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 95 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through January 19
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