NEW YORK — If you have been living in the United States in recent years — heck, if you have been living on this planet — you are no doubt familiar with a tired, desperate question whispering in the back of your mind: “Can’t we all just agree on something?” On the evidence of “Eureka Day,” the alarming and entertaining new play by Jonathan Spector, the answer is a conclusive “no.”
Don’t despair, though. The Babel-like collisions of opinions now dominating the national conversation — on rostrums and social media platforms and at dinner tables — may be hell on your nerves. But remember that what’s worst in human nature has long been the basis of the liveliest and most satisfying theater, be it tragedy (Sophocles) or comedy (Molière).
“Eureka Day,” which opened Thursday at Walkerspace in a Colt Coeur production, treads the unsteady ground between those extremes with surprising assurance. Though its early scenes may lead you to think that you’ve entered a satirical shooting gallery filled with easy targets, it winds up engaging you on a much deeper, more compassionate level.
The central subject of the play, directed with sharp finesse by Adrienne Campbell-Holt, could hardly be more topical: mandatory vaccinations for children. Its five principal characters, the board members of a private day school in Berkeley, California, have been created in the mold of iron snowflakes: left-leaning, determinedly inclusive people who are aggressively sensitive to the sensitivities of others.
You might think that these delicate souls, who twist themselves into pretzels to avoid hurting one another’s feelings, would be of a single mind on such an issue. But when one of the students comes down with mumps — and the county health department issues an edict demanding quarantine for all unvaccinated pupils — the once unified board starts to crack and splinter.
In the squabbling and eventual all-out feuding that ensues, characters who had seemed so easy to ridicule as stereotypes acquire a substance and specificity that inhibit both derision and facile categorization. It becomes possible to identify with each of these people, embodied by an impeccably codependent ensemble, no matter what your own feelings about vaccination are.
This means that “Eureka Day,” which made its debut last year at the Aurora Theater Company in Berkeley, is not only one of the funniest plays to open this year, it is one of the saddest.
Like earlier, estimable comedies of enlightened grown-ups scrapping like toddlers — Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage” and The Mad Ones’ fabulous “Miles for Mary” — “Eureka Day” is partly about the limitations of a tribal language. The tribe, in this case, consists of people determined to rear their children in a way that would validate all possible identities, ethnic and sexual, and individual points of view.
This means that in their board meetings, people talk on tiptoe. Their rules of conversation include using gender-neutral pronouns whenever possible when referring to students. And the play begins with the group discussing whether to use the term “transracial adoptee” in its list of ethnic identities in registration and application forms.
Here, for example, is an early exchange between two of the members, who tend to interrupt one another.
One begins: “If our Core Operating Principle here is that everyone should Feel Seen by this Community —”
Another leaps in: “There’s no benefit in Feeling Seen if you’re Being Othered.”
(The capitalization comes from Spector’s script, and you hear it in the way the performers speak, too.)
The group meets in the school’s small, whimsically decorated library. (John McDermott is the spot-on set designer.) And the meeting is run by the ever-propitiatory Don (Thomas Jay Ryan), the dad-shorts-wearing head of the school who likes to end each session with a reading from Rumi, the mystical Sufi poet.
The other members are all school parents, costumed (by Lux Haac) with artfully calculated casualness. They include the bouncy, eager Eli (Brian Wiles), a very rich stay-at-home dad who helped found a tech startup; the crisp and elegant Suzanne (Tina Benko), who exudes a knife-edged patrician politeness; and the shy Meiko (K.K. Moggie), a single mom who is romantically involved with the married, polyamorous Eli.
Then there’s the newcomer to the board, Carina (Elizabeth Carter), a black lesbian with a special-needs child. (Her race becomes an issue, for the record.)
Carina has yet to be indoctrinated with the prevailing mindspeak. Good-natured but guarded, she at first functions as the skeptical surrogate for the audience. But be careful about how much you invest in identifying with her.
There are sparks of friction among this painstakingly polite assembly from the beginning. But once the first case of mumps is identified, raising the issue of how to deal with the unvaccinated students, a full conflagration erupts that extends beyond the walls of the little library.
That’s because Don has thrown open a crisis management meeting to all parents, via the school’s Facebook page. And as is the wont of such commenters, those who are posting online (we see every comment, via Kate Ducey’s projection design) are a little less inhibited than the people meeting face-to-face.
Observing the counterpoint of the live discussion and the increasingly hostile comments on the screen behind is like listening to the voices of Ego with Id subtitles. If I hadn’t had some experience of such social media donnybrooks, I would have described this scene as grotesquely exaggerated, for nasty comic effect.
The hard, wild laughter that emerges from the audience, though, reminds us of how true to life the whole melee is these days. Though the play is short (roughly two hours), you will need the intermission that is provided after this scene.
The more contemplative second act suffers a bit from a surfeit of point-making plot. But it also allows each of the excellent cast members to reveal the confusion and vulnerability of people so hungry for certainty that they have stopped listening to everybody else. Benko has a harrowing monologue that seems to stop time.
Don, who has an aphorism for every occasion, trots out one of his favorites in the penultimate scene: “We do not turn our children into villains.”
Observant and empathetic, Spector takes the same approach to his characters.
Might we not agree that he is following a Golden Rule for playwriting? What? You don’t agree? Sigh. Of course not.
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‘Eureka Day’
Through Sept. 21 at Walkerspace, Manhattan; coltcoeur.org.
Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.
This article originally appeared in
.