Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day is about a private school brouhaha over vaccination rules. It’s a zesty satire that manages to be both scathing and charming. Written in the wake of Trump’s first election, it was commissioned by Aurora Theatre in Berkeley, CA, where it premiered in 2018, and has since had numerous other productions, including a brief Off Broadway run in 2019. Manhattan Theatre Club is producing its Broadway premiere, and the production directed by Anna D. Shapiro couldn’t be better. The killer cast includes Bill Irwin, Jessica Hecht and Amber Gray.
Spector lives in Berkeley, and the heart of his play is a dead-on sendup of Berkeley liberals. The work first germinated in 2014, he says, when a measles outbreak at Disneyland prompted California to change its vaccine requirements from extremely lax to extremely strict. Spector was shocked to learn then that some of his fellow school parents, with whom he thought he agreed on almost everything, lived in a completely different world from him regarding vaccines.
It was a different world in lots of ways back then. Before Covid, before Trump’s re-election, before the nomination of the anti-vaxxer RFK Jr. to lead our nation’s health policy, I’m pretty sure I would’ve laughed lustily at this comedy. The material is rich, and Spector is an acute and honest observer who knows the territory well. Unfortunately, my laughter’s getting stuck in my throat now.
On the subway ride home from MTC, my phone buzzed with the news that Aaron Siri, an RFK lawyer helping vet candidates for top health jobs, had petitioned the government to revoke approval for the polio vaccine and 13 other major vaccines. A day later, Colin Jost turned that news into a punchline, quipping on Weekend Update, “it aint Christmas without some Tiny Tims!” I couldn’t laugh at that either.
We critics sometimes describe good contemporary plays as magnifying glasses, a trope for the way they make very specific realities feel like enlarged pictures that tell valuable general truths about the world. Eureka Day does that. I respect it. At the same time, it seems to me right now a play that has inadvertently collided with a giant magnifying glass, as birds do with patio windows. Satirical laughter requires knowing where you stand, where you’re laughing from, and who can feel that now? The ground beneath us is unstable. The actual return of preventable scourges looms terrifyingly large.
Eureka Day’s setting is the comfy elementary school library of a private Berkeley day school (rendered with delicious precision by designer Todd Rosenthal). The executive Board meets there surrounded by kiddie furniture, progressive kid-lit, and sundry social justice posters (“Berkeley Stands United Against Hate”). Since the ethos of the school is that everyone must “feel heard,” all Board decisions are by consensus.
The action opens on a sticky discussion we don’t even understand right away because Spector’s focus is on everyone’s quirks of speech, including compulsive hedging and qualification (masking pushiness), and repeated claims of confusion and puzzlement (to cover passive-aggression). Even the unfailingly kind and diplomatic Head of School Don (Irwin) must be a master of tight smiles. The absurdly trivial point under discussion turns out to be whether “Transracial Adoptee” should be added to a dropdown menu of racial identities that already includes ten categories.
Most New York theatergoers know self-caricaturing liberals like this as well as Spector does. Larissa Fasthorse also skewered them on Broadway last year in The Thanksgiving Play. Tens of millions of Americans just voted for Trump specifically because of their loathing for such people. That’s the magnifying glass. How can any thinking person help wondering whether it’s the best time now to skewer them again?
Spector’s plot is set in motion by a Mumps outbreak that sends one Board member’s kid to the hospital and forces closure of the school. After the county health officer bars kids from returning unless they can document immunity, a community-wide Zoom meeting is scheduled to discuss whether a policy change requiring immunizations should be adopted. It quickly spirals out of control.
The parents ignore the Board’s remarks and weigh in on the Chat function with increasingly nasty and personal comments that are projected gigantically onto the set walls. The audience laughs so hard at this cat-fighting that the onstage dialogue is completely drowned out. I too laughed at this, I’ll admit, but only because the exchange became so quickly vile and absurd. It was pure provocation. Anyone paying close attention will already have seen where the plot was going: toward a challenge to the Board’s naively idealistic consensus decisionmaking policy. This proves untenable when the most insufferably self-righteous Board member of all turns out to be unbudgeable on required vaccines.
As this crisis comes to a head (spoiler alert here!), Spector raises the emotional stakes by having this Board member explain—with curiously dry eyes—that she once lost a child after a routine vaccination. Wow, I thought, now there’s a manipulative plot choice. But I soon accepted it in the spirit of polemic. Because the Board eventually outmaneuvers and replaces this member, the larger point is clear: institutions and communities can preserve themselves as long as they can manage to agree on truth. But be warned: civility will break down when communities can’t agree on facts, and even sincere social-justice warriors can sometimes be as blind to the common good as MAGA Republicans.
There’s an aftertaste of smug self-satisfaction in this play’s final scene, with the newly configured group enjoying the absence of its troublemaker. I wondered, watching these people press on with their noble causes, what place smart homilies like Spector’s have in the theater right now. What I can’t let go of is the insidious social cause of that Board member’s intransigence, unmentioned in Eureka Day. Her personal tragedy aside, she was, like countless millions of others, woefully misled by tsunamis of disinformation unceasingly circulated and amplified by vastly powerful tech companies whose profits depend on perpetual discord and outrage.
The first time a playwright makes me laugh—or scream—about that, I will leap from my seat.
Photos: Jeremy Daniel
by Jonathan Spector
directed by Anna D. Shapiro
MTC at Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
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