There seems little purpose in offering lavish, must-see praise to a play midway through its25-performance run—it closes September 21—in a 65-seat off-off-Broadway theater, which despite being produced by a little-known non-profit with a little-known playwright and little-known players is virtually sold out due to violently positive word-of-mouth. Must see, yes, only you are unlikely to see it lest you have tickets in hand. But does that suggest that we should simply ignore Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day?
No. Eureka Day is not to be ignored. With any luck, this caustically funny but trenchantly provocative comedy will reappear somewhere, soon, in our vicinity, hopefully with the same excellent cast and production. Take this as a warning: be prepared to pounce at the first announcement.
Spector’s play hails from the Brooklyn-based Colt Coeur, under the artistic direction of Adrienne Campbell-Holt, who also provides the impeccable staging. Colt Coeur has taken temporary possession of the Soho Rep space on Walker Street in Tribeca, which accounts for the brief scheduled run of the play. But who’d have guessed that it would take off like fireworks? And strike a nerve or three, too?
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★★★ review here.]
(Eureka Day premiered at Aurora Theatre Company in Berkeley, Calif.—the playwright is based in Oakland—in April 2018, with an altogether different production except for one returning cast member.)
A quintet of touchy-feely do-gooders runs the board of the communal, cash-strapped Eureka Day School, a private school in Berkeley where students—and parents!—are encouraged to express social justice and their own selves while doing no harm, physically or emotionally, to others. The board is run by consensus, rather than voting, and seldom is heard a discouraging word.
This being theater, a discouraging word is eventually heard, and the proceedings turn treacherous. Let us add parenthetically that we have of late seen several plays dealing with like-minded groups of adults sitting in elementary school classrooms and one way or another throwing each other into disruption, so much so that frequenters of non-Broadway venues might think they’ve already visited Eureka Day. That is not the case, decidedly; Spector takes what is becoming a not-unfamiliar mise-en-scène and uses it to launch into something fresh, refreshing, and new. And caustically funny.
The discouraging word in question, mind you, is not of the four-letter variety or an ethnic slur; or even “neurodiversity” or “inclusion,” which are indeed keywords around the child-sized library table where the adults share a clutch of gluten-free blueberry scones. (No disposable plates allowed!) The fly in the ointment of the play turns out to be what we might as well call the “v” word, as in vaccination. A case of mumps brings an edict from the Alameda County Health Department commanding that all children with no documentation of immunity be quarantined from attending school. (Talk about up-to-the-moment topicality!)
The consensus-ruled board is decidedly not in consensus over the matter, leading to a “community activated conversation” held not in the school auditorium but—due to the risk of infection—online, with Facebook page commentary beamed on a screen above the stage. What starts with a politely controlled speech by the Head of School, accompanied by an occasional online comment, devolves into five overlapping onstage conversations punctuated by a rapid-fire barrage of more than 100 texts, increasingly laced with obscenities, death threats, and emojis.
It is impossible, naturally, to follow the actors’ overlapping lines, especially while trying to read as many as four simultaneous messages assaulting the screen. That is Spector’s intention, of course; this episode devolves into one of the funniest comic whirlwinds on the current-day stage, so furiously outrageous that the author and director are more or less impelled to break for an intermission in what would otherwise be a 90-minute one act.
Enough said, I suppose, about this play-you-will-likely-miss this time around. The cast of five is impeccable, so we’ll do little more than list them: Thomas Jay Ryan as Don, the reformed-hippie-ish Head of School; Tina Benko as Suzanne, a controlling founding parent of the school; Brian Wiles as Eli, a hyperkinetic stay-at-home dad (but previously “like the twelfth employee at Google”); K.K. Moggie as Meiko, a single parent whose daughter is one of the first to contract mumps; and Elizabeth Carter (from the Berkeley production) as Carina, a first-year parent who refuses to be steamrolled by the anti-vaxxers.
Director Campbell-Holt deserves full honors for the proceedings, with a valuable assist from set designer John McDermott whose “typical” elementary school library set abounds with surprises. (The generic-looking “ABC” placards atop the borders of the walls include, among other things, “T” for “trans.”)
So keep your ears peeled, do, for word of a future day for Eureka Day.
Eureka Day opened August 29, 2019, at Walkerspace and runs through September 21. Tickets and information: coltcoeur.org
