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.
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.
“Eureka Day” begins as a stock satire of the painstakingly earnest progressives at a small private elementary school in Berkeley, California, leading to one of the most hilarious scenes of the year, before it settles into a serious, thought-provoking exploration of an alarmingly relevant issue: vaccines. Indeed, despite the stellar cast and director Anne D. Shapiro’s solid direction, the issue has become so newsworthy that Jonathan Spector’s play lands differently now – less comfortably – than when it was first produced in Berkeley in 2018 (the time and place where the play is still set.) What then might have seemed admirably balanced now seems dangerously so.
2024 | Broadway |
MTC Original Broadway Production Broadway |
Videos