In a celebratory hour, a play for the moment.
Such might be the description as Syracuse Stage opens the 2021/2022 season and welcomes the return of fully produced live theater this week with Jonathon Spector’s uncannily prescient “Eureka Day”—a play about the thorny topic of vaccines.
Spector’s play is not about Covid. He started writing it in 2016 and set it in 2017 in a private school called Eureka Day in Berkeley, California, where a mumps outbreak has not only made at least one student seriously ill, it has exposed a significant fault line between those parents who vaccinate their children and those who don’t and very much don’t want to. The ground upon which this proudly progressive bunch has built its inclusive community is suddenly quaking—badly. It is up to the school’s five member executive committee to quell the parental discord and try to mend the ruptures that now threaten Eureka Day’s survival.
The play unfolds in a series of meetings in the school’s library. Junghyun Georgia Lee’s set is inspired by famed California architect Julia Morgan, supported by Dawn Chiang’s lighting and stunning projections of San Francisco Bay by Lisa Renkel. Flanked by posters promoting diversity, integrity, citizenship and kindness, and advising “Our differences are our strengths,” the committee quickly discovers that their first challenge is to sort out their own divisions.
This structure allows for a healthy airing of opinions and beliefs about what today is an inescapable topic. The convictions expressed by the committee members—as well as many of the parents who join an ill-advised Facebook meeting—run the gamut from silly to heartfelt, from utterly absurd to reasonable. In this Covid era, four years ago, or even 18 months, seems like an entirely different world, and the distance lets Spector’s script land today with newfound humor, truth and empathy. The “issues,” though in specifics different from today, are never abstract. The play is too intimate and the stakes too personal. Spector’s characters are true, their struggles real, their earnestness genuine, their faults human; they are in so many recognizable ways like all of us living through this unasked for and unwanted moment.
“‘Eureka Day’ is actually a richer experience today than when it first came to our attention two years ago,” said Robert Hupp, Syracuse Stage artistic director who is directing the season opener. “What was far-fetched craziness then is reality now.”
“Eureka Day” garnered numerous accolades when it premiered on the West Coast, taking all of the San Francisco Bay Area’s new play awards: Glickman Award, Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Award, Theater Bay Area Award and Rella Lossy Award. A 2019 production in New York earned a New York Times Critics’ Pick, an honorable mention in Time Out New York’s Best Plays of 2019 list, and a New York Drama Critics Circle nomination. Playwright Spector knows the play will be received differently today, he’s just not sure how.
“That is one of the things I am excited to learn when I get to watch the production with an audience,” said Spector, who will be in attendance at Syracuse Stage on opening night. “The big shift that has happened is that part of what was compelling for me about the idea of the play was that vaccine hesitancy was one of the few contentious issues that did not line up neatly with party affiliation, unlike climate change, gun control, abortion, taxes. Knowing what you think about vaccines did not necessarily tell me what you think about all those other things in a way the rest of them would. And that has begun to change pretty rapidly in this time. Vaccines have become highly polarized politically. That feels like the biggest shift to me in terms of what the reality is.”
For Hupp, the immediacy of “Eureka Day” is what makes it the perfect play for celebrating Syracuse Stage’s return because “at its core, it is a funny and moving play about the conflict between personal choice and the greater good. This play, and this production, give us permission to laugh at the absurdity of the world around us and to wrestle with our own feelings about who gets to decide the thorny question of what’s right for our community.”
“Eureka Day” is running now through Oct. 31. Tickets available at syracusestage.org or at the box office, 315-443-3275.
Covid policy: Prior to entering the interior lobby, patrons will need to show proof of vaccination (this can be via the Excelsior Pass, the actual vaccination card, or a copy or picture of it). All non-vaccinated guests will need to show proof of a negative test result from either an antigen-type test taken within six hours prior to entry or a PCR-type test within 72 hours prior to entry of the theater. Masks, properly worn, will be required at all times in the lobby and theater except in designated areas where limited concessions may be enjoyed.