The needle-sharp satire ‘Eureka Day’ puts vaccines, the paradox of tolerance, and our era of rancorous debate at center stage
The Huntington is producing Jonathan Spector’s Tony Award-winning comedy that explores the vaccine debate, the limits of tolerance, and our age of vitriolic online discourse.
In a time of venomous social discord, when civic discourse has turned as toxic as a Superfund site and online spaces have become vitriolic cesspools, the fictional private school at the center of Jonathan Spector’s play “Eureka Day” seems like an oasis from all the noise. The school bills itself as a welcoming haven that “holds space” for everyone and invites and respects a range of viewpoints.
But in an effort lead with empathy and do the right thing, these well-meaning, progressive-minded parents and school board members often twist themselves into pretzels. Conversation and language is often reduced to meaningless cant and incomprehensible platitudes that miss the point. Yet lurking beneath all those conflict-avoiding niceties and expressions of values are turbulent emotions and strongly held points-of-view that are straining to emerge.
Playwright Jonathan Spector brilliantly explores these contradictions in “Eureka Day,” his uproariously funny and needle-sharp satire about a vaccination debate that engulfs a progressive-minded private school when a mumps outbreak erupts. The play first premiered in 2018 in Berkeley, California, and landed in New York in 2019, just a few months before the Covid pandemic emerged. With its story of a viral outbreak and vaccination debate more timely than ever, the play was revived on Broadway last season, became a hit with audiences, and won the Tony Award for best revival of a play. The Huntington is now producing the Boston premiere of “Eureka Day” at the Huntington Theatre through June 28.
The play resonates in the current climate not just because of the vaccine arguments, says director Margot Bordelon, but because the toxic online discourse has spilled over into our social and civic spaces. “One of the things that many people find most distressing about being alive right now is how extremely politically divided we’ve become and how a conversation with the opposition doesn’t even feel possible,” Bordelon says. “We’re living in these echo chambers on social media and in our lives. And I think this play encourages people to not turn the other side into monsters, that most people really are trying to do the right thing.”
In the play, the board of the Eureka Day elementary school in Berkeley, California, that bastion of liberalism, is meeting inside the library to discuss a number of issues, including whether to add the term “transracial adoptee” to its drop-down list of options for ethnic identities in registration and application forms. When one parent argues that the school’s Core Operating Principle is that “everyone should Feel Seen by this community,” another parent quickly retorts, “There’s no benefit to Feeling Seen if you’re simultaneously Being Othered, right?”
As the play goes on, this kind of circuitous language and jargon-filled niceties obscure some of the rising tensions and brewing conflicts.
Aging hippie Don (Ken Cheeseman) is the Rumi-reciting head of the school who tries to be a calming presence but is easily flummoxed. The unctuous Suzanne (Nancy Lemenager), a parent at the school since its founding, exudes passive-aggressive politeness. The school is her life, so she’s forceful about how things should be done. Eli (Japhet Balaban), a wealthy former tech startup bro, is now stay-at-home dad who’s still learning the rules of the road at the school and getting his arms around the ever-evolving language. Meiko (Sasha Diamond), quiet but with a wry sense of humor, is a single mom who we learn is having an affair with Eli. Then there’s board newcomer Carina (Eunice Woods), a Black woman with a special needs child and a female partner. The audience stand-in, she keeps her guard up at firsts as she’s still learning the ropes and has yet to be indoctrinated into the sometimes mind-numbing jargon.
The play’s engine really revs up, though, when a mumps outbreak erupts, with more than 100 kids having to quarantine, and the public health agency sends a letter to the school urging parents to get their children vaccinated. While vaccinations hadn’t been required in the past, the board is now considering whether to require them for all the kids as a condition of attending school, which raises the considerable ire of Suzanne and her fellow anti-vax parents.
The poop hits the proverbial fan at an incendiary “community activated conversation,” a livestreamed online meeting with the board members running the meeting from the library and parents at home typing their comments and questions into a chat (those comments are projected onto the wall at the back of the library for audiences to see).
So what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real? As with the Covid pandemic, the pro-vaccine parents are apoplectic at people in the school community putting their kids at risk, especially in the middle of a disease outbreak, while the anti-vaxxers defend their views, repeat misinformation, and resist a vaccine mandate.
“We can try and live up to what we say are our core values or higher selves. But at the end of the day, we’re survivalists,” says Bordelon, who directed “John Proctor Is the Villain” for the Huntington in 2024. “Parents want to protect their children. So when push comes to shove, all these things they say that they believe in are not going to be prioritized over their greatest attachment, which is their kids.”
Which brings up the old paradox of tolerance. In an effort to be tolerant of other’s points-of-view, you can risk elevating and empowering the intolerant and validating those who are just plain wrong. What, in fact, are the limits of tolerance?
“I do think the play a skewering of liberal culture and how we can take our tolerance too far, when we actually just need to, for lack of a better term, pull the trigger and make hard decisions,” Bordelon says. “It takes them a long time in this play to get the school reopened because they give so much time and space to engaging in a debate around vaccines. Instead of saying, we’re actually going to listen to the science and the facts, and this is the choice we’re going to make.”
Yet this era of discord and disagreement, the very nature of the baseline truths are in question, which can make it difficult to engage in debate. “Suddenly, a fact has become malleable,” Bordelon says. “No, facts aren’t malleable. There are not alternative facts.”
That conversation about “feelings versus facts,” Balaban says, “creates a situation where there’s real unstoppable force versus the immovable object in this play when it comes to someone’s feelings and experiences versus the facts on the ground.”
Still, the anti-vax parents are not caricatured. Spector makes you understand their motivations, that it often derives from fear or traumatic episodes from their pasts. “He does such a beautiful job of showing Suzanne’s point of view and her reason for being an anti-vaxxer,” Bordelon says. “He really gives her such a full humanity. She isn’t two dimensional.”
Adds Balaban, “We learn that all of the characters have an experience that informs why they are where they are on the central issue. It’s like, ‘I believe this because this is my lived experience.’ And I think it’s hard to dissuade people from their opinions that are formed by these lived experiences.”
While Spector is skewering tendencies among liberals to behave and speak a certain jargon-filled, performative way, he’s also asking audiences to connect with the characters on a personal level. “There’s some really fun moments where the audience gets to enjoy or see themselves in the characters that we’re playing,” Balaban says. “There are plays about issues that allow the audience to sit back and congratulate themselves. And what I really like about this play is that it really challenges the audience to find themselves or find people that they know in it.”
The live-streamed emergency meeting exposes the divisions and the wide gulf of disagreement. As the scrolling comments become increasingly vitriolic and incendiary, you’re seeing everyone’s worst, most venomous inner-thoughts projected onto the wall. “Just answer honestly: would you rather have measles or autism?” says one parent in the chat. To which another retorts, “Just answer honestly: were you dropped on your head as a child?”
“What I love about that part of the play is that it actually unmasks all of the true nasty feelings that are going on,” Bordelon says. “We’ve watched these five core characters try to cover those feelings with politeness, appropriateness, and PC language. But [with] the parents’ online avatars, everyone’s true feelings and their nastiest selves get exposed.”
She adds that we chuckle at the recognition, because we’ve all seen conversations on social media devolve into acrimony and vitriol. “It’s messed up because it’s still a human interaction,” Bordelon says. “But, I mean, the language in the [livestream] comments are deliciously funny and brilliantly written.”
On Broadway, the audience’s howling laughter in that explosive scene threatened to overwhelm the dialogue. So Spector and Broadway director Anna D. Shapiro had to adjust the performers’ lines and the timing of when certain comments pop up, to leave space for the uproar to die down and allow the dialogue to be heard.
“When I saw it on Broadway, at the second preview, I could tell that they were still trying to find a balance between what the audience needed to hear vocally and the timing of where the laughs come depending on what’s up on the screen,” Bordelon says. “So we’ve been rehearsing with a video monitor behind the actors, so I can watch the livestream comments come up in real time. But it’s all fun and games until the audience gets there!”
At the heart of the play, Bordelon says, is Carina’s argument to Suzanne in the penultimate scene. “We live in a society that’s so driven by individualism. We think individual choice should be our right, rather than thinking about, When do we need to release some individual choices for the good of the whole?” Bordelon says. “Do you want to live in a world where you’re not allowing your child to face the tiniest amount of risk in order to save someone’s aging parent or newborn child? Is that really the kind of society you want to live in? We all have to assume a small amount of risk to take care of the greater good.”
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