Is “Eureka Day,” a Tony-winning comedy now on the boards at the Pasadena Playhouse, as uproariously funny as it is because the script feels veritably ripped from today’s headlines? Or does it get its chuckles in spite of that pressing topicality? After all, not very many people are laughing right now about the battles over child vaccinations, which is the subject of the seriocomic arguments that erupt among a group of parents in Jonathan Spector’s script. But the fact that the play is now being presented as a period piece, set in the late 2010s, when it was first produced, puts us at just enough of a remove from the present madness to let down our guards and guffaw. If the climate hasn’t yet immunized you against that sort of thing.
The primary setting is a classroom at a progressive private school in Berkeley, unfolding almost entirely in a series of board meetings where disagreements over how to handle a mumps outbreak expose deep and eventually quite angry rifts among the parents, on and off the board. The first thing to know is that, as opposed to how we might be receiving news stories about vaccine wars at the moment, this is not a right-versus-left thing. All of the parents at the Eureka Day school are liberals in good standing, just as a baseline, and the play serves as a reminder that virulent anti-vaxxers have been found on the left, too, even if we’re not hearing much from those voices right now. We sure hear a lot from them in “Eureka Day,” though, and the comedy comes from how quickly a left-leaning, peace-loving community can turn into a circular firing squad, given the right trigger.
Strong performances are equally spread out among the five actors on stage. (Technically, there are six, but revealing the nature of the extra cameo would involve a minor spoiler.) The man ostensibly in charge of the board is a somewhat passive-aggressive fellow named Don, played by Rick Harmon, who looks and sounds a little like “Office Space’s” Bill Lumbergh, if he had something closer to a good heart. Don wants to make sure everyone is treated equally, to almost painful extremes, but is inevitably the guy most likely to step on other opinions. Anyone who’s ever been in a business meeting amid a controversy may recognize him as the type of leader who responds to something that could be an existential threat by pulling out a marking pen and inviting suggestions for a list of “action steps.” He’s villainous only to the extent that his platitudes are a time-suck.
The three women characters are all of a more cut-the-bullshit mindset, or at least they all eventually end up there, allthough it’s at different points in the proceedings that they each arrive to peak impatience, and for quite different reasons. The clearest firebrand of the group is Suzanne (Mia Barron), whose patronizing politeness will eventually give way to rage once her views are challenged. Carina (Cherise Boothe), a Black lesbian newcomer to the school and to the board — and the audience’s surrogate for getting caught up on how things work there — is the most grounded character, with a willingness to step back and let more experienced players lead that will be challenged when things begin to spiral. It may not be an accident that Meiko (Camille Chen) has “meek” built right into her name, which portends that her eventual eruption under pressure may be the most explosive of all. What we know best about her in the early going is that she is having an affair with the second male character, Eli (Nate Corddry), although it may not count as illicit as this ultra-pleasant tech guru is allowed to experiment, in his open marriage to an unseen partner… maybe.
In the first scene, any bickering among this mostly harmonious enough group occurs over such inconsequential agenda items as whether to add identities as specific “transracial adoptee” to a list of self-descriptors in the school’s pulldown list. That’s an example of how blatant the spoofery can be in “Eureka Day” — self-spoofery, anyway, since in its broadest strokes, the show is a satire of liberalism, but an inherently affectionate one. Conservatives might come to the show and get a kick out of the ribbing that’s doled out to the most touchy-feely wing of progressivism, although at some point they’d know this has been written as more of an intra-family fight than owning the libs.
The idea that the infighting is all in the family gets put to the test when the aforementioned mumps outbreak occurs, and the school has to be shut down, with the debate happening over whether a vaccine mandate will be put in place before classrooms reopen. This leads to a mid-play “town hall” scene in which the board sets up an online forum for all of the school’s parents to weigh in with their opinions, which turns out to be a horrible idea unforeseeable only to anyone who’s never seen open warfare erupt in an internet forum before.
Therein is a scene that unfolds as something really unique in comic theater. At least I can say that I don’t ever remember laughter coming across as loud in the confines of an 800-seat space as what transpires with a full house at the Pasadena Playhouse during this sequence. The funny part, if you will, is that not that much of it is due to what the cast members are doing on stage. No slight to them, at all, but they are basically playing straight men and women to the overhead screen, where we see a scroll of of the increasingly hostile messages that the parents attending the virtual meeting are sending the board and each other. At some points the laughter becomes so loud that you can’t even heard what the cast is saying on stage, and you hope that it’s inconsequential enough that you don’t need to, because the yuks are coming from the off-stage parents who, one at a time, are going completely nuclear in the chat. Finally, the board will have the good sense to just snap their host laptop shut, but not before a wickedly riotous 10 minutes or so in which absolutely no one backs away from the keyboard.
“Eureka Day” is never going to top that extended mid-play sequence for hilarity, and so thankfully it doesn’t try. But an inevitable dip in the final scenes into something poignant doesn’t let the comedy slip completely away. Characters do come on- and off-stage during these blackouts, and the one who is putting up the greatest resistance to a vaccine mandate gives a compelling monologue explaining why she ended up there — in which you can feel playwright Spector doing his own humanist duty in reminding the audience that even the adversaries of what we’d consider reason have their reasons, as often as not.
But the deck is stacked, so if you happen to be an anti-vaxxer, don’t come to “Eureka Day” imagining that the cards are going to be doled out equally. If anything, Spector stacks it a little more against the play’s driving anti-immunization force than he needs to, also seeming to make her a casual, if accidental, racist, one more strike against her than is really necessary. Just as it becomes all too clear what we’re going to wind up thinking of Suzanne, it’s not quite clear enough what we’re to make of Eli, the tech mogul who kind of serves a purpose as a deus ex machine at the end, or his romantic partner, Meiko. It’s nothing short of a pleasure to see Chen’s low simmer finally boil over, but then once she’s gotten mad, really mad, she retreats to the margins for the final scenes, making you wish she merited a real climax, or at least proper anticlimax, of her own.
Those quibbles aside, it’s hard to overstate what a good time you will have settling in with this splendid cast, under the beautifully paced direction of Teddy Bergman. Spector’s dialogue is so sharp that you may find yourself making an immediate note to go see anything and everything of his that will ever pop up on the theater calendar. He’s written the kind of play where, when the last scene in (the intermission-less) action turns out to be much shorter than those that have preceded it, you may let out a sigh of disappointment, that the whole affair isn’t going to go on just a little bit longer. (You will certainly be left wondering how the original version of the play that ran in the late 2010s ended; this version has a perfect punchline that could not been written pre-pandemic, and that’s all we’ll give away about that.)
Most of all, if you’re even close to the progressive end of the spectrum, “Eureka Day” is notable for just how much it at least regards its characters as apparently decent souls, whatever digs it gets in at their fallacies, self-delusions and eagerness to toe certain lines at any cost. Spending time with a set of sharp-talkers who bicker and break down but ultimately mean well, on some level, counts as some kind of balm in an environment where we may be coming to believe of our fellow citizens and leaders that maybe a lot of them just don’t. With the combination of wicked banter and ultimate good will that “Eureka Day” has to offer, you’d be well-advised to take the shot.
