Eureka Day review – thorny Broadway play takes on school vaccination chaos
By all appearances, the Eureka Day school in Oakland, California, is a progressive, welcoming, warm-hearted place. The shelves of the elementary school’s library, as staged at Samuel J Friedman Theatre in a sharp new play by Jonathan Spector, boast a colorful, cacophonous overflow of books. There’s a prominent “social justice” section; the walls are bedecked with posters celebrating the likes of Maya Angelou, Michelle Obama, Cesar Chavez and the concept of DEI. (Convincing set design by Todd Rosenthal.) The school’s puttering five-person executive board – often, in this play directed by Anna D Shapiro, sitting on chairs meant for children – are adept at the language of deference for the sake of conflict avoidance: “deeper learning”, “holding space”, “in my personal experience”, and on and on.
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If this all sounds tedious, well, so is the high-wire act of trying not to offend anyone. Luckily for audiences and a first scene that teeters on the edge of caricature – it’s too easy to laugh at woke-addled characters who hold “community activated conversations” – harmony is difficult to uphold in, you know, these times. It’s the 2018-19 school year, and Eureka Day faces an outbreak of the mumps.
The way this seemingly straightforward issue – health department-ordered quarantine and then return for vaccinated students – mutates into a furious beast of conflict is a devilishly pleasurable thing to behold, owing to Spector’s on-the-pulse script, which sharpens as the viewpoints polarize, and a slate of excellently balanced performances. Carina (Amber Gray), a new parent to the school and the lone Black board member, assumes Eureka Day will follow standard health guidance. Meiko (Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz), parent of a young child with mumps, and longtime employee Suzanne (a standout Jessica Hecht), are more reluctant, viewing vaccinations as a values, personal liberty choice – and Eureka Day as accepting of all values. Thomas Middleditch, of HBO’s Silicon Valley fame, plays an early tech giant employee now proudly a “full-time father” known to give financial gifts to the school, pending everyone getting along. Beleaguered principal Don (Bill Irwin, with the physical bearing of a man fighting too hard to take up less space), assumes this can all be solved by that great panacea: the digital town hall.
That scene, in which the “comments” display behind the actors (an impressive amount of fake names and profiles to create; projection design by David Bengali), marks a turning point, both for these naively, self-importantly polite characters – you can imagine, and have probably witnessed, how this quickly devolves from conversation to charges of fascism – and the for the play’s rhythm, which settles into something thornier, sharper and more surprising than someone bringing up the Holocaust. Spector, who is based in Oakland, has a knack for demonstrating how so much of “woke” language – and I’m using that word in the aesthetic sense, not as a comment on politics – is simply ego dressed up as humility, a sense of self-importance derived from the performance of tolerance. How tolerance itself can be a colorless, anodyne concept when it becomes a value unto itself. And how nothing inflames tensions, digs in heels and flashes teeth like “what’s best for the kids”.
It’s a tricky balance to show and not condemn. You can probably guess where my sympathies lie, in terms of the vaccination “debates”, but Spector smartly avoids easy dunks as Eureka Day’s fault lines become canyons, though nobody on the board wants to admit as much. No one is a villain here; if anything comes off poorly, it’s reverence for conflict avoidance in the name of community. Every character gets to land a fair punch, or make a good point, as well as appear both risible and ridiculous. At Eureka Day, as in most places, most people are well-meaning, often deeply misguided, trying to make sense of what limited knowledge and life experience they have. Trauma scalds and morphs. And humor, at least in this remarkable new play, somehow transcends the third rail of parent debates.
