Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day had its New York premiere in 2019 at Walkerspace, Soho Rep’s former haunt, where I reviewed it. This clever play has returned in a completely new Manhattan Theatre Company production at Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. It continues to excel as a bitingly topical dramedy, one that reminds me of the immortal words of Sean O’Casey’s bibulous “paycock,” Captain Jack Boyle: “The world’s in a terrible state of chassis.” (The following adapts some material from my original review.)
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| Bill Irwin, Thomas Middleditch, Amber Gray, Jessica Hecht, Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz. All photos: Jeremy Daniels. |
Unless we live in a bubble (and many do), it’s a wonder how we navigate the “chassis” of daily life when we’re besieged by more nerve-jangling issues clamoring for our attention than ever before: presidential politics, terrorism, climate change, drug addiction, health care, abortion, white nationalism, gun control, the Middle East, the environment, sexual assault, transgenderism, racism, antisemitism, massive hurricanes, a free press, privacy, identity, unidentified drones, vaccinations . .
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| Amber Gray, Jessica Hecht. |
Each of these (and others) could be the spur that drives writers to create topically pertinent dramas, comedies, and musicals. Aside from the endless stream of works dealing with identity issues (ethnic, racial, or sexual), however, those dealing in potent ways with the others come more as single spies than as battalions. Fortunately, one such spy is Eureka Day, set mostly in the child-friendly library—perfectly designed by Todd Rosenthal and lit by Jen Schriever—of the eponymous Berkeley private school.
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| Bill Irwin, Jessica Hecht. |
Eureka Day—originally
done by the Aurora Theatre Company in Berkeley—gives the winter season, with
its paucity of straight plays dominated by a succession of musicals, a
well-needed shot in the arm with its clever way of exploring the ramifications
of compulsory vaccinations. With anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy, Jr., up for a major
federal health care position, the subject could not be riper.
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| Thomas Middleditch, Amber Gray, Bill Irwin. |
Spector carefully develops his discussion drama around Eureka Day’s four continuing board members and their “floating” member, whose child is a new enrollee. The continuing ones are Don (Bill Irwin, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), the school head, and the parents, Suzanne (Jessica Hecht, Summer, 1976), Meiko (Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz, making her Broadway debut), and Eli (Thomas Middleditch, TV’s “Silicon Valley”). Joining them is Carina (Amber Gray, Hadestown). Clint Ramos’s perfectly considered costumes for these well-off, well-educated, California parents help make them all seem real.
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| Thomas Middleditch, Amber Gray, Bill Irwin, Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz, Jessica Hecht. |
The board prides itself on the school’s emphasis on
social justice and non-confrontational attitudes toward controversial issues. Spector
masterfully satirizes this by putting them through linguistic hoops as they
struggle to articulate their thoughts without giving offense. That, however,
doesn’t prevent the occasional, unintentional, mildly racist sling sent by the embarrassingly
apologetic Suzanne in the direction of the African American Carina.
Eureka Day, craftily
directed by Steppenwolf’s Anna D. Shapiro (August: Osage County), covers
a lot of ground (even squeezing in an affair between Eli and Meiko) in its now
smartly trimmed 95-minute version (it ran over two hours in 2019). Although it has
fun poking fun at how concerns for diversity lead to micro-labeling ethnicities,
its chief mission is to show what happens when the board is forced to deal with
an outbreak of mumps leading to a health department directive requiring all the
non-vaccinated students to get shots. Just because this school is in the
liberal enclave of Berkeley is no reason to believe the well-read parents all
accept the scientific support for the importance of vaccines, whether for mumps
or a host of other ailments.
Spector does an exquisite job of making fun of the stranglehold
forcing the board to consider everyone’s ideas as equally valid, demonstrating
the emotional and psychological tubes through which the board members—overseen
by the always placating Don—must squeeze themselves to show how fair and open
they are to all opinions. The word “woke” is never spoken but you’d have to be
asleep to miss its presence. Politesse in the name of political correctness has
rarely been so finely shaded, creating a situation where no one can take a
position because to do so would be to express advocacy rather than seek
consensus, as if consensus is even possible. Spector’s demonstration of the
conflict between the relative value of individual needs and community ones is
one of the play’s strongest features.
Of enormous help is the playwright’s capturing the
hesitant rhythms of dialogue in which the otherwise articulate characters
struggle to avoid offending by backtracking at any sign of disagreement or by
speaking in partial sentences and ellipses. Feelings and opinions are repressed
in the interest of “community” values, often creating time-burning digressions
when they should be confronting concrete problems. Don, especially, is unable
to stand up for his beliefs, claiming he’s just a “facilitator.”
There is one particularly
brilliant comic scene revealing both the board’s suppression of its own
disparate views and the far freer ones of the school’s parents as demonstrated
during an online livestream meeting held between the board and the parents. As
Don and the board talk about the issues, a plethora of parental comments are
projected (projection design by David Bengali) on a large upstage screen.
If you’ve ever engaged in an online discussion, you can
imagine the vitriol that pecking at a keyboard can inspire, even when your name
is attached to your remarks. Mixed with the “thumbs up” emojis that keep
popping up at regular intervals, and, as tempers rise, getting ever bigger laughs,
are one hilarious insult and riposte after the other. It’s sometimes impossible
to follow what the actors are saying while simultaneously reading the online
comments, which require constant attention. You may not even be able to tell if
the bursts of raucous laughter are inspired by something someone said (and that
you missed) or something someone wrote. I wonder if the actors themselves, who
do their energetic best to get their points across, know just how much they’re
being upstaged by all the trolling.
Although I’d like to see the cast take it down a notch in
the opening scene, when they display a tendency to push, as if they feel a need
to grab us before we know who they are. Each actor eventually deserves a
shout-out, but I’ll choose Jessica Hecht’s overexplaining, vaccine-questioning Suzanne
as the standout. The role itself, of course, is a juicy plum with many
dimensions; I pointed to Tina Benko in the same role five years ago. Hecht retains
her distinctive vocal inflections, a sort of breathless, placating tone, mingled
with tremulous urgency, although modulated here more than in some other of her
performances. The more you see this star, the more you recognize her special uniqueness.
Spector manages to avoid injecting the play with overt polemics, allowing his characters to show what happens when both-sideism is the order of the day. Much as he needs to cloud the discussions with disclaimers, though, there’s no doubt where he stands. And the tag line he’s added to this new production could not be improved.
I wished in 2019 that Eureka Day would
prove contagious and be quarantined somewhere for a longer run. I’m happy to
say that wish came true.
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 W. 47th Street, NYC
Through January 19
