School is in session! Manhattan Theatre Club brings Jonathan Spector’s play Eureka Day, directed by Anna D. Shapiro, to Broadway.
What's it all about? 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.
Despite its familiar subject matter, Spector has explained that he wrote the play long before the COVID pandemic.
Before Broadway, the comedy had its world premiere at Aurora Theatre Company in Berkeley, California as part of their 2017-2018 season and was commissioned through their Originate+Generate program. It went on to have its east coast premiere off-Broadway at Walkerspace in 2019, and opened at the Old Vic in London in 2022. It arrives on Broadway with an all new cast.
Hecht and Gray are excellent here and throughout, as is Shapiro’s whole company. They’re not clowning — though there’s a delightful wink of a moment in which Irwin’s Don waxes misty-eyed over the “actually quite subtle” mime work of a former colleague. Rather, they’re performing that crucial aspect of theater, its function as a space of civic practice, quite literally a place where we rehearse the hardest conversations, where we experiment with how to put together a community. In his script’s epigraph, Spector quotes from Eula Bliss’s On Immunity, where Bliss herself cites a doctor who describes a certain vaccine as “important … from a public health standpoint” but “not as critical from an individual point of view.” “In order for this to make sense,” writes Bliss, “one must believe that individuals are not part of the public.” It’s this cognitive dissonance, so widespread and so clamorous and so tragically American, that theater, by its very nature, is always addressing, and in Eureka Day that essential refutation takes on explicit and eloquent form.
Happily, director Anna D. Shapiro, who has an illustrious history of finding comedy in discord, has assigned the role of Suzanne to a theater veteran whose distinctive presence and exquisite comic timing are ideally suited to the part, Jessica Hecht. Ms. Hecht’s Suzanne is, like many women she has played, a little flighty on the surface, but the actress also, eventually, mines the deep pain this character carries inside her with shattering authenticity. Amber Gray brings an effortless dignity to Carina, who quickly finds her footing and emerges as a rival to Suzanne’s authority. As the rather temperamental Meiko and Eli, who’s complacent and a bit clueless but fundamentally decent, Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz and Thomas Middleditch engagingly flirt, spar, and endure their own crises. Don is played by the estimable Bill Irwin, who predictably finds the clown in this scrupulously well-intentioned but overburdened fellow. Don gets to say the last sentence in “Eureka Day,” which serves as a brilliant punchline for a play that finds refreshing humor, and some poignance, in subject matter that has proven burdensome for all of us.
2024 | Broadway |
MTC Original Broadway Production Broadway |
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