‘Eureka’ finds ills universal
Had “Eureka Day” merely taken anti-vaxxers to task without making fun of them, seriously considered where they’re coming from without elevating what remains a fringe view, that alone would have been plenty of achievement.
But Aurora Theatre Company’s world premiere commission, seen Friday, April 20, achieves still more.
In envisioning a very liberal and very privileged Berkeley private school, Jonathan Spector’s play is so crisply defined that you might have to periodically remind yourself that you haven’t already met these characters in real life. Don (Rolf Saxon) is the conflictaverse head of school who at various executive committee meetings with parents gets a balletic spring in his step from abstract nouns, scones and markering notes on tearaway butcher paper. Longtime hyper-involved volunteer Suzanne (Lisa Anne Porter, bouncing up and down with the enthusiasm of Richard Simmons) is equally vehement in bulldozing her views over everyone else’s and then reproaching herself for doing so. Eli (Teddy Spencer), periodically breaking into yogic stretches, interrupts proceedings
at such a spastic volume it’s as if he’s still in a garage with the tech bros with whom he made his millions. Meiko (Charisse Loriaux) alternates between in-your-face candor — “I find the best way not to put words in someone’s mouth is not to put words in their mouth” — and the sort of panic that expands a clash with fellow parents into a rupture in the cosmos.
Josh Costello’s direction makes this group as intimate as family. Over the years they’ve constructed an elaborate shorthand and set of shared norms that firmly ensconce them in their Berkeley hills bubble (and Richard Olmsted’s set, overlooking a spectacular Golden Gate panorama, only further isolates them from the base populace).
It’s all initially impenetrable to newcomer Carina (Elizabeth Carter, who perfectly balances bafflement, fear and deference). But if the veterans are overzealous in correcting her every breach of decorum — No referring to children by their gender! No decisions without consensus! — Spector and Costello make clear that they also genuinely want to welcome her and her family into the school they deeply love and devote their lives to.
That goodwill raises the stakes when Don gets a letter from the health department telling him one of his students has contracted mumps. Fault lines slice across the room. No one is imprudent enough to lay his or her cards on the table, but Spector makes every apparent stab at diplomacy into a sly bid for power. Here, to speak is to set the terms of the conversation, which is to remove your opposition from consideration without even talking about it first.
What follows is an ingeniously communicated total failure of communication. “Framing” and “values” become magic words that put the kibosh on any actual exchange of ideas. “Uncomfortable” is an all-powerful trump card. But the alternative is even worse. In one uproarious scene, Spector becomes one of the first playwrights to find a way to make a Facebook comments section cesspool work as live theater. As the executive committee hosts a Facebook Live for the rest of the school’s parents, the torrent of their vitriol musters so much momentum as to become like a physical force in the room.
Spector proves as much a master of pathos as of comedy. The sickness of “Eureka Day” of course isn’t just the automatic tearjerker that is ill children, but the polarization of our politics and the poverty of our discourse. We humans have no way of truly accommodating, either in language or in policy, an irreconcilable difference. That’s even if we do all the right things, like explain the life story that makes a view more understandable, then listen, then empathize. Even after all that, our flaw, that we must always pick a winner, prevails — which means someone has to lose.