Cringe-worthy comedy hits targets
‘Eureka Day’ spoofs vaccination debate, life in Berkeley
Sometimes a moment in a comedy will make you laugh and cringe at the same time, and for the same reason: What’s happening may be totally outrageous, but it’s also all too recognizable as behavior you’ve witnessed (or taken part in) that’s not even particularly exaggerated.
That happens a lot in “Eureka Day,” the new play by Jonathan Spector commissioned by Aurora Theatre Company as part of its Originate + Generate new work development program. Coartistic director of Berkeley’s Just Theater, Spector sets his play in a self-consciously progressive Berkeley private elementary school where all decisions are made by consensus among a small executive committee of parents. When a mumps outbreak at the school brings an official letter from the health department, the community becomes vexingly— and seemingly irreconcilably — split around the issue of vaccinations.
Richard Olmsted’s wonderfully realistic classroom set, packed with bookshelves and social justice posters, pretty clearly places the school somewhere in the Berkeley hills, with a stunning view of the bay out the window.
From the start of director Josh Costello’s wonderfully tense staging, it’s uncomfortably funny how much the parents on the committee make a show of hearing and agreeing with each other while also talking over them and speaking for them. Newcomer Carina
(bewildered but calm and collected Elizabeth Carter) has to learn to navigate the almost smotheringly considerate way of doing things that the committee gently insists upon, from avoiding gendered pronouns in referring to their children to refraining from bringing paper plates to meetings.
Shoeless and conspicuously doing stretches, Teddy Spencer’s Eli gets easily swept up in whatever point he’s trying to make, barreling along while others try to get a word in. There’s a brittle defensiveness bordering on desperation underlying Lisa Anne Porter’s much-rehearsed easygoing egalitarianism as Suzanne, because
she feels she has the most to lose from anything changing.
Charisse Loriaux’s slightly cynical Meiko is often pointedly detached in meetings, usually knitting and often getting peeved at others for putting words in her mouth. Rolf Saxon’s mild-mannered, relentlessly upbeat Don is comically obsessed with immediately smoothing over the slightest hint of differences of opinion, even if it means nothing ever getting resolved.
Spector has a great ear for the way locals talk, how “yeah, no” means something very different from “no, yeah.” The way an online discussion scrolling by on the screen quickly and completely goes off the rails is as gut-churning as it is hilarious, precisely because it looks like it could have been plucked verbatim from any number of arguments on social media.
It’s a play that’s explicitly about the difference between respectfully hearing out different opinions and treating all viewpoints as equally valid regardless of evidence when children’s health is at
stake. Spector walks that line adeptly in his script, revealing that one character’s beliefs are strongly and indelibly grounded in traumatic personal experience in a way that can’t (or at least shouldn’t) be argued with, and yet that doesn’t make that person right.
Billed as a “comedy of liberal manners,” the play lovingly skewers any number of maddening tendencies that should be familiar to many in the Bay Area, such as people second-guessing everything they say before they’ve even finished saying it, or reaching for extreme false equivalencies to score rhetorical points.
Between that and the subject matter that’s awfully contentious in certain circles, “Eureka Day” may spark some agitated post-show conversations eerily mirroring the ones in the play. That just goes to show how keenly observed the comedy is. It hits awfully, gut-churningly close to home.