Video: EUREKA DAY Cast Gets Ready for Broadway

Up next at Manhattan Theatre Club is Jonathan Spector's Eureka Day, starring Amber Gray, Jessica Hecht, Bill Irwin, Thomas Middleditch, and Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz, and directed by Anna D. Shapiro.

"Any play for me is a series of private obsessions- you get really fixed on some idea. So it was very strange to have suddenly the  whole world obsessed with the thing that felt like my private obsession for so long," explained Spector, who wrote the play before the COVID pandemic. "I also feel like it's a play that I only could have written before COVID, because I wouldn't have had the necessary distance. And when it's something that everyone is talking about, it's too hard to have your own thoughts, space, and ideas."

Eureka Day is a private California elementary school with a Board of Directors that values inclusion above all else – that is, until an outbreak of the mumps forces everyone in the community to reconsider the school’s liberal vaccine policy. As cases rise, the board realizes with horror that they’ve got to do what they swore they never would: make a choice that won’t please absolutely everybody.

"I think it's a comedy of manners for this impossible moment. It's so easy to make fun of progressive, right wing people," added Shapiro during a break from rehearsals. "It's like shooting fish in a barrel. These are people who are really authentically, genuinely trying to do the right thing."

Watch as the cast tells us more about the new play in this video.