Considering that Jonathan Spector started writing Eureka Day in 2016, it’s a little surprising that the play’s arrival December 16 at Manhattan Theater Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater is as topically hot as it is. But it is—so hot, in fact, that it’s hard to imagine any show this season more politically charged. Why? It asks a much-batted-about question nowadays: to vaccinate or not to vaccinate?
Spector’s daughter was not even a year old when he began this play, which concerns an outbreak of mumps in a private school named Eureka Day. Now she’s a third-grader, and he finds himself an active participant in colloquies that he had only imagined eight years ago. “When I wrote the play,” he tells Observer, “I was not at this phase in my life, but I had had experiences that led to this—a few moments of conversations with friends or people I knew. They were very smart and very well-educated. Some had the same politics I had and the same kind of basic worldview. Then, I discovered they didn’t vaccinate their kids—and that was always a shock. It was very curious to me how it was we could agree on everything, except for this one thing. It meant we occupied a different reality.”
Spector was struck by this: similar people living in the same place but occupying different realities. And he responded by writing about it. “Quite often, plays come to me from having some sort of strange experience,” he says. “I wonder about it a while, and then I follow it down the rabbit hole to whatever it leads me to.”
Spector was living in Berkeley, California, and had a commission with a theater company there—the Aurora—to write a Berkeley play for that Berkeley audience. Eureka Day is what he came up with.
“Really, I had no ambitions or idea it would necessarily resonate for people outside of Berkeley,” he admits. “So it’s wonderful to see it now on Broadway, which I never could have anticipated or imagined. It’s certainly not the kind of relevancy I was hoping for. I’m still trying to understand what the play means in this moment. This is a very different time.”
Specifically, it’s a time when the President-elect has picked Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—who can charitably be described as a vaccine skeptic, and less charitably as anti-vax—to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and encouraged him to “to go wild on health.”
“It remains to be seen how successful he’ll be, but at a minimum it’s going to be bad for public health,” Spector says of RFK Jr. “Even if all they do is change the public guidance from ‘You really should get childhood vaccinations’ to ‘Only if you want to’—a shift in the public stance and public messaging would be enough to do some real harm.”
Enter Eureka Day, which Spector says started out a serious drama and acquired a lot of humor along the way: “I think of it as a funny play about serious things.” Basically, it’s not so much a play about vaccines as it is a comedy about a community craving a consensus. When there’s an outbreak of mumps at Eureka Day, the county health department issues an edict demanding quarantine for the unvaccinated. An emergency meeting of the school’s Board of Directors is held in Eureka Day’s child-friendly library. Mealy-mouthed but well-meaning, the board is super-sensitive to others, given to using gender-neutral pronouns. Round and round they go, pursuing a goal of inclusion they’ll tragically never achieve.
When this becomes abundantly clear, they turn to “Community Activated Conversation,” opening the crisis management meeting to all parents via the school’s Facebook page. Suddenly, the screen on the library wall is alive with irrelevant, hilarious, extraneous remarks. And the five poor actors on stage have to play through the laughter that was not of their doing.
Anna D. Shapiro, the Tony-winning director of August: Osage County, have gotten some fine performances from the flinty five: Hadestown’s Amber Gray, A View From the Bridge’s Jessica Hecht (an actress who’s not afraid to let her harridan out), Old Hat’s Bill Irwin, Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch and How the Light Gets In’s Chelsea Yakuta-Kurtz. Plus 40 Facebook nuts.
Though Eureka Day finds some comedy in the vaccination debate, it’s clear Spector thinks the subject is no laughing matter. “You’re already seeing in red states the rates of people getting their kids vaccinated for measles and mumps going down,” he says of the current moment. “It’s quite scary. If you talk to any doctor or any public health official, they’re very, very anxious about it.”
