“Eureka Day” at the Manhattan Theatre Club
Robert Schneider in New York
12 February 2025
On the evening I attended, audience members at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre seemed eager to receive Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day as a satire on wokeness. They giggled at even modest demonstrations of social virtue from the characters, all of whom serve on the Executive Board of Eureka Day, a fictional private school in Berkeley, California.
When treated to pronouncements such as, “There’s no benefit in Feeling Seen if you’re simultaneously Being Othered, right?” audience members almost begged for more. Liberals to a fault, Board members protested their own goodwill a bit too much—and took extreme care not to offend anyone inside or outside the room for any individualizable reason. This resulted in some elaborate circumlocutions, incomplete sentences and tortuous vocabulary.
Bill Irwin and Jessica Hecht.
Photo credit: Jeremy Daniel.
The Board, for example, offers eleven choices (couched in 19 euphemisms) on the pull-down menu that applicants’ parents can use to identify their offspring’s “racial heritage”. Although the Board wants to “hold space” for everyone, they decide not to add “Transracial Adoptee” to the menu. The exchange, however, uncovers interpersonal sensitivities which expand across Spector’s text in parallel columns [this layout cannot be replicated on a website] sprinkled with unspoken words in square brackets:
SUZANNE
it’s just
my understanding of that term is
is that it’s a way to think about our
Cultural Identity.
ELI
suresure
SUZANNE
and also to think how it impacts
ELI
it’s complicated
SUZANNE
the way our racial identity is formulated
and created over time …
CARINA
so that makes [sense]
that actually sounds right to me
I mean I can just say as/ a Bla[ck Woman]
ELI
oh oh oh
sorry to cut you off but I wonder
CARINA
no no no [go ahead]
ELI
I wonder if there’s a better frame
for this conversation which is:
who is the dropdown menu for?
Trump supporters might chortle—and there are indeed Trump supporters who chortle—to see the Board perform linguistic leaps and slides to avoid bias and spare feelings. Even liberal audience members enjoyed the red meat of hypocrisy and, yes, they had quite a bit to choose from. An expensive private school with an exaggerated concern for social justice is a contradiction in itself. Is it because Board members sense this that they go to such pains to underplay their privileges and resist hierarchy?
I submit that the play is richer with its satirical elements muted. For all their jumping through hoops of wokeness, the Board members are democrats at heart and democrats by training. They seek consensus in part because the by-laws require the five of them to rule by consensus, but also because they sincerely don’t want to suppress any point of view by voting it down. If the process requires patience, good manners and thoughtfulness, so be it. At America’s current political moment, patience, good manners and thoughtfulness are not to be scorned. If the Board appears weak, it’s because democracy itself becomes weak when it seeks never to offend.
The play is set at the beginning of the 2018 school year. The immediate question to be addressed is an outbreak of mumps. The Board of Health wants unvaccinated students who have never had the disease to stay home. Out of solidarity with the excluded students, the Board contemplates shutting down the school entirely until the quarantine is over. Is this a good idea? The Board decides they can put their Values Into Action by submitting the question to a Community Activated Conversation. [Spector’s text is full of coerced capital letters hence the unusual capitalization in this review.]
The Community Activated Conversation, when it comes, is extremely funny. Don, the school director and Zoom host, tries to present the problem and possible solutions while the other Board members huddle behind him. He is distracted by a barrage of sidebar comments, emojis and folk medicine offered by the online participants which the audience sees projected on the rear wall (projection design by David Bengali). Although one of the parents is a paediatrician, her expertise is largely ignored. Everyone, it seems, has done their own “research” and uncovered their own “facts.” The meeting descends quickly to invective and name-calling between the vaxxers and antivaxxers.
Don tries to follow the comments as he speaks and so quickly loses his chain of thought. The other in-person attendees, seated too far away to read the comments, try to intervene but are shot down by hilarious non-sequiturs and cross-talk from people at home. It falls to Eli—a Board member whose son will later catch the mumps and suffer a permanent hearing loss—to clearly state the problem:
ELI
you just mean like
it’s one thing if you’re looking at this from a Public Health Perspective
talking about what’s best for Whole Populations
as opposed to maybe
the choices people are making as Individuals.
The play shows us that communities aren’t automatically composed of individuals. Communities exist when individuals subordinate their private certitudes to the common good, something we never see happen in Eureka Day.
Eli and Suzanne have come to opposite conclusions about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. The play faulters when it gives each of them a sick child as a talisman of their sincerity. In Suzanne’s case, the child later dies. Was it really necessary to push these adults to their positions with the ramrod of lived experience? Don’t adults hold opinions without being forced into them by suffering? In the universe of Eureka Day, feelings hold sway over science and those feelings must be deeply motivated. There is no consensus.
Only when Don unearths a procedural method to free the board from the tyranny of unanimity can it finally move forward. It’s a political coup and a blatant rescinding of Core Values and Procedures, but it allows the Board to finally require vaccines.
In a neat coda, we see Don, his optimism restored, welcome the re-configured Board at the first meeting of the following school year: 2019-2020. Little do they know what awaits them.
At MTC, Don is played brilliantly by Bill Irwin. As the Board members set up chairs for the meeting, there’s a cute bit of metatheatre when Suzanne mentions that one of the past school parents was a clown.
DON
he was a mime, actually.
he had a
a mime school in Sausalito.
did you ever see him perform?
SUZANNE
no
DON
his work was
it was actually quite subtle.
The character might well be talking about the actor who plays him. Irwin’s famous skill as a mime is always apparent. He sends intimations of partially-checked stress into every part of his body but does it subtly. Jessica Hecht is equally sure-footed as Suzanne. She never sends the character into caricature (on one hand) nor bathos (on the other).
Thomas Middleditch hides Eli’s Silicon Valley fortune beneath an ah-shucks manner and a baseball cap (costumes by Clint Ramos). Eboni Flowers plays the new-parent-and-only-African American-Board-member by carefully deflating our preconceptions of what those labels entail. Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz plays the quietest member of the Board, the one who carries on an adulterous affair with Eli.
The walls of the school library in Todd Rosenthal’s set are papered with posters and messages on the theme of social justice. Through the windows we see a photo-realist California townscape and a bright blue sky.
Director Anna D. Shapiro frequently asks her actors to reach out and almost touch each other, a gesture that’s almost as poignant here as on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
