The late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.” In the play “Eureka Day,” which opened this week on Broadway, that notion is up for vitriolic debate.
Set in a posh and exceedingly “woke” private school in Berkeley, California, where all pronouns are gender neutral and the dropdown menu for self-identification is pages long, this biting comedy depicts a community torn apart at its vegan seams after a mumps outbreak.
Written in 2018 by Jonathan Spector, it satirizes hypocrisy and double standards among the liberal elite and the “anti-vaxxer” crowds. But following bitter debates about COVID-19 vaccines and the controversial views of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President-elect Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, Spector’s script takes on a new significance, one his audience is buzzing about after each performance.
GZERO’s Tony Maciulis spoke to Spector about his Broadway premiere, the difference between “feeling seen” and being validated, and what his work says about our society today.
Tony Maciulis:
First, congratulations on the Broadway debut. Aside from “funny,” the word I am seeing most frequently to describe Eureka Day is “timely.” But it was written before we’d ever heard of Covid or considered the possibility of RFK, Jr., running HHS. Do you think it’s timely?
Jonathan Spector:
I think it's timely, but in a complicated way. Unless you happen to have young children or be at a very particular moment in your life, for most people [vaccines were] not something that they were spending a lot of time thinking about. And now in the past [few] years, it has become something that we all have spent a lot of time thinking about and have a lot of really strong feelings about.
Circa 2016, when I first was conceiving of it, vaccine skepticism was one of the very few really contentious issues which was not correlated to political belief. There were people who didn't vaccinate their kids on the right and on the left, and they got there in different ways in terms of their thinking.
But just knowing somebody vaccinated their kids did not necessarily tell you anything about the rest of their politics in the way that knowing somebody's position on climate change or gun control is probably going to tell you what they think about most other things. So that made it an exciting thing to explore.
Tony Maciulis:
What inspired you to write this story about a private school in Berkeley?
Jonathan Spector:
I had a commission from Aurora Theater in Berkeley, so I was trying to write something very specifically about Berkeley. And at the same time, I had had this experience of being in conversations with friends or acquaintances who I thought were really smart people, really similar in our approach to things, and then discovered they didn't vaccinate their kids. I found that very disorienting and curious. And, also at the time, some of the communities with the highest rate of unvaccinated were the most privileged communities in Orange County and Marin County, California.
So that aspect of it, the collision between this sense of power and privilege and the way that ties in with not wanting to expose your own child to risk because everybody else is kind of taking on that risk for you was how I found my way into the play. And I started writing it in the lead up to the 2016 election, so I also was confronting the degree to which it felt like half the country just lived in a different reality than we did in a way that I had not fully been aware of up until then.
Tony Maciulis:
The cast is amazing. Bill Irwin, Amber Gray, and Jessica Hecht to name a few. And each of them has foibles and flaws despite the best of intentions. But is there a villain or antagonist in this play?
Jonathan Spector:
There's a line in the play where Don [played by Bill Irwin], who's the head of the school, leads into a difficult conversation by reminding everybody that no one in this room is a villain. Everybody just wants to do what they think is best. It's not to say that people in the play, when they're put into really difficult circumstances, don't behave badly. But I think fundamentally, they all are trying to do what they believe is the best thing for everybody. And they have confronted a situation in which it's impossible for everyone to get their way and have agreement about what's best. Those things are not compatible with each other.
Tony Maciulis:
As the school’s board of directors is trying to figure out how to respond to the mumps outbreak, Bill’s character writes “ALL POV = VALID.” It seems to me that should have a question mark after it and not a period. Yes?
Jonathan Spector:
Right? Yes. That's interesting. It might be that the play begins with everyone believing it's a period, and maybe the process of moving through the play is a changing from being a period to a question mark.
Tony Maciulis:
By far the most hilarious scene is a virtual community meeting where the chat screen becomes the star of the show. What were you saying with that choice?
Jonathan Spector:
When I was researching the play, I spent so much time in the bowels of internet message boards where people would argue about vaccines. And people just get so nasty in those forums. And because we spend so much of our life online, it was missing something to have a play that's exploring this issue without bringing that aspect of it into it. But I didn't want any of the characters to have to be that nasty to each other, that didn't feel right either. This was my solution to that.
So, it was sort of this wall of laughter, the entire scene. And now having been through several productions [of the play], it's always very funny when I try to explain to the actors what it will feel like, and no one really believes me until the first time they have an audience. And then it's like, oh, wow.
Tony Maciulis:
You mentioned that it first premiered in Berkeley and that you had friends in the community that were anti-vaxxers. Are they still talking to you?
Jonathan Spector:
Yes. I did a bunch of interviews when I was first working on the play with some of these people, as well as with some public health experts. One of the people who I had interviewed, somebody who didn't vaccinate her kids, said [after seeing the play] “I loved it because I think what I have to say is so smart. And now all these people were stuck in a room having to listen to it.”
Tony Maciulis:
With memories of the pandemic still with us and a Cabinet confirmation hearing about to get underway where the merits of polio vaccine will likely be debated, what do you hope the audience takes away from your show?
Jonathan Spector:
This production is going to the Kennedy Center in DC for a few weeks in March. It's going to be very strange because by then we will be well underway with wherever we will be, which is hard to wrap your mind around to some degree. And maybe how I'm thinking about our politics more broadly after the election is that there are people who are just wrong in what they think and what they believe, and those wrong beliefs can be harmful. And yet we have to find a way to interact with those people, and talk to them in a way that can engage them rather than just dismissing them.
The only way you can really get someone to change their mind is by making them feel like you're really listening to them, and you're taking their ideas seriously. And only then do they become open to hearing what you have to say.
“Eureka Day” is currently running on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman theater.