“You can always spot a Eureka Day kid, because at soccer games, they’re the ones who cheer when the other team scores.”
So says Carina (Amber Gray), the parent of a new enrollee at Berkeley’s Eureka Day school, explaining what had been her thinking in placing her son there. To this point, like-minded members of the audience at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre have been ushered into the world of this swaddlingly well-meaning institution through familiar signifiers of liberal best intentions. The school library where the executive committee meets is bedecked with a “Berkeley Stands United Against Hate” poster and images of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Michelle Obama, and Maya Angelou. Longtime school booster Suzanne (Jessica Hecht) swans about, so full of empathy that she cannot sit still, in diaphanous hippie-by-way-of-Eileen Fisher dresses. And everyone is committed to making the symbolically fraught 2018-2019 school year one of really hearing each other. “We only make decisions by consensus,” says Meiko (Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz), another school parent. Sounds ideal — or, at least, idealistic. Which means the same thing, right?
But while the kids may be cheering for one another, their parents can’t quite get there. Carina, not merely a breath of fresh air as a new Eureka parent but a Black woman, might seem to have a fair amount to share with her white counterparts on the committee; indeed, Don, the head of school (Bill Irwin) tells her that “we welcome your unique perspective.” It’s hard not to notice, then, that she gets cut off somewhat ostentatiously by her white fellow parent Eli (Thomas Middleditch), who seeks to “reframe” the conversation before Carina gets to make her point. And that’s before the conversation even turns contentious.
Written by Jonathan Spector — a playwright based in California’s East Bay area, where the show is set — and directed by Anna D. Shapiro, “Eureka Day” is a cleverly staged social satire, one that earns enough goodwill to buoy it even as certain of its flourishes don’t quite land. The committee, and the school, is eventually riven by a debate over the school’s policy on vaccines — which is to say, its lack of a policy, as Eureka’s laissez-faire attitude towards mandated shots leads to a mumps outbreak. But the sickness that “Eureka Day” diagnoses, through shrewd character work and deft, economical bits of plot development, is still more contagious.
Take, for instance, a set piece in which the committee, Don and the four parents designated to assist him in his management of the school, hosts a teleconference call during the school’s closure due to the mumps outbreak. This closure could be foreshortened, or limited solely to the unvaccinated children, if the group could just agree — but little chance of that.
This sequence, the show’s comic high point, represents at once a deft piece of stagecraft that, in the cacophony of angry comments projected behind the heads of Don and company, becomes a clever comic dissection of the public square in the age of Zoom. Forget consensus. Faced with the consequences of their own willingness to live and let live — a virus, after all, doesn’t really care about the careful attempts to weigh all parties’ opinions when it comes to vaccinating their kids — the group dissolves into typed-out recriminations, all while Don pleads for calm. There’s a certain poetry to the fact that the audience response to the comments shown on the screen behind the committee drowns out the actors’ attempts to quell the madness, making the actors at times inaudible. (The interplay between actors and onscreen text is precisely timed enough to make holding for applause impossible.) With that said, it also means that a good portion of the play’s crucial turn is, by design or miscalculation, near-impossible to make out.
But this is a small critique of a show that gets so much else right. A play about the social mores of left-liberal parents in the late 2010s might have landed with a thud at a time when the national mood seems to so thoroughly have repudiated their vanities and their values alike. The moment might seem to have passed — and, besides, part of the trouble with an In This House We Believe sign, from a comic perspective, is: Where does one even begin?
Spector’s answer seems to be: Start small, and from a human perspective. We get to know each of the committe members well before they’re faced with real drama, and, through their little interpersonal tiffs and misstatements, they come to feel, each of them, like someone one could meet at the right farmer’s market or canvassing trip. Meiko and Eli are distracting themselves through midlife, while Carina is a bushel of best intentions slowly realizing that life was better at a school where kids and parents alike could at least be honest about being in it for themselves. And Don and Suzanne are the show’s two deftest comic creations; in a deeply talented ensemble, Irwin’s way with stammering uncertainty and Hecht’s insinuating niceness are the two most elegantly deployed weapons. Don, notionally in charge of the place, is so worried about offending any possible stakeholder that he defaults to an eloquently defended inaction. And Suzanne, a tactician in clogs, takes advantage of Don’s fecklessness to argue her anti-vaccine position from a place of intuition and emotion that no marshalling of facts can combat — not in a circle that runs according to consensus, anyway.
“Eureka Day” doesn’t have an answer for how to fix this sorry state of affairs, but that it poses the question makes it a play with an unusual amount on its mind, and a fine night of theater that will fuel post-show conversation long after the curtain falls. It is concerned, in the end, with no less than the state of how liberals speak to one another, in 2018 and right now — and the impossibility of making forward movement when every voice is allowed its turn. “ALL POV = VALID,” Don writes on a whiteboard at the play’s midpoint, urged on by Suzanne, who’s angry at feeling unheard.
Carina has an objection: “Everyone’s point of view is not equally valid, like, all of the time,” she says. The mastery of “Eureka Day” lies in the fact that one only realizes a beat after it happens that Carina is cut off as she speaks, first by Suzanne and then by Don, who asks her to “let this sit for now.” We’ve been ushered, gradually and completely, into a world where every voice matters, of course, but some — those of an establishment class who want to make sure everyone is really welcomed — matter more than ours.
English (US) ·