Manhattan Theatre Club’s new dramedy takes place in the Eureka Day elementary school library, located in Berkeley, California and attended by the spawn of well-to-do liberals. Colors are bright, chairs cheerfully plastic and neat signs demarcate shelves dedicated to “social justice” and “fiction.” The longer you stare at Todd Rosenthal’s vibrant set, though, the more you suspect a visual pun’s afoot. What fills the eye? Countless spines of books. What is Eureka Day’s subject? Spines. Those that wobble with the winds of “wokeness” and those inflexibly fixed on personal certainty. Bending over backward, performatively bowing, or stiffening, many a lumbar will be stress tested here. Jonathan Spector’s play, about vaccine politics splintering a school board, is one big Learning Moment that pretty much everyone fails.
The hypocritical-liberals farce is nothing new on Broadway; see older hits like God of Carnage or more recent fare such as The Thanksgiving Play for dramatists peeling away the KN95 mask of civility, so to speak, to reveal the curled lip of contempt. Unlike those earlier titles, Spector endows his characters with more humanity and complexity. But is it enough to make us care? After November, the idea that a center-left professional from California speaks for the nation has been depressingly trashed. Recent events have both magnified or diminished this clever comedy. From the first scene’s wrangling over which ethnic categories to include in a drop-down menu (“transracial adoptee”?!), we know these types: coastal elites who drop “holding space” and “othering” with a straight face. As the story unfolds, Spector throws some curves that give his P.C. caricatures more depth: serious pain, genuine parental tragedy. Even though Eureka Day had its New York premiere five years ago Off Broadway, the search for a more perfect union in our disinformed times continues. Today, post-Covid and pre-Trump II, the audience may view this 2018 scenario almost wistfully.
Let me introduce the board. First is Don (Bill Irwin), the genial-to-a-fault principal who strives to accommodate all points of view. Not to murder my “spine” conceit from above, but one might recall Irwin’s bendy Mr. Noodle from Sesame Street. Like that wiggly chap, Don jiggles with unctuous angst, vacillating for consensus. Suzanne (Jessica Hecht) has put all of her children through Eureka Day, and lords her superior morals like a virtue-signaling dragon lady. Über-Karen Suzanne assumes Black lesbian Carina (Amber Gray) only pays half-tuition for her child—a microaggression that comes back to bite her. Wealthy and smarmy tech bro Eli (Thomas Middleditch) and shy single mother Meiko (Chelsea Yakura-Kurta) fill out the board—oh, while also carrying on an affair. Which is totes progressive: Eli and his wife agreed to an open marriage. What could go wrong? Mumps. Meiko’s daughter passes the virus to Eli’s son during a “play date,” and an epidemic soon shuts down the school.
Instead of a rational and efficient containment of the disease, the emergency splits the community between pro- and anti-vaxxer. It turns out that a significant number of Eureka Day parents mistrust Big Pharma, a crunchy granola position they passionately defend during a “Community Activated Conversation” that signals the show’s comedic high point. As Don and the board lead a Facebook Live town hall about whether to mandate student vaccination, parallel dialogue unfolds in the chat room, where we see parents’ sarcastic and increasingly vicious and hateful insults projected on the set.
As a dramatist, Spector has technique to spare: He sketches each character with a satirist’s unsparing eye, leavened by sudden flashes of compassion. At Eureka Day, Don declares, “We Do Not Turn Our Children Into Villains,” and he includes the board in that promise. Even so, you may start to think anti-vaxxer Suzanne is the heavy, but Spector subverts that expectation with a blood-chilling monologue which the magnificent Hecht delivers with her genius for spontaneous, tremulous honesty. The whole ensemble excels, firmly steered by director Anna D. Shapiro to a hilarious state of bureaucratic and ethical crisis. In the end, consensus is reached, and the community heals—but not without a sacrificial lamb. I left the Friedman Theatre equally amused and disturbed: If a coterie of smart, morally sophisticated citizens devolves into chaos, what hope does a nation of poorly educated yahoos have? There’s no germ that spreads as fast as stupid.
Eureka Day | 1hr 40mins. No intermission. | Samuel L. Friedman Theatre | 261 W. 47th Street | 212-239-6200 | Buy Tickets Here
