Cinnamon Schultz, John Resenhouse, and Teisha M. Bankston in Eureka Day (Brandon Parigo)
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, much of the art and media produced about the era ended up falling flat. Works that addressed the pandemic head-on often felt dated or gimmicky, giving the impression that it was simply too close to the experience we were all living through to capture it well.
It makes a strange sort of sense, then, that one of the best pieces of COVID-era art was actually written two years before the pandemic hit.
Jonathan Spector’s comedy Eureka Day, currently running at Kansas City Actors Theatre, first premiered in 2018. Set in a private school in affluent Berkeley, California (where the play was first developed and performed), the play takes place across a number of meetings of the school’s executive board during the fall of 2018. Eureka Day is the kind of school whose soccer players, as one parent puts it, “cheer when the other team scores,” and where the board only makes decisions by unanimous consent.
That last point proves troublesome when an outbreak of mumps hits the student body and a quarantine is issued. Parents who support the CDC’s recommended vaccination protocols are shocked to learn just how many of their fellow ultra-liberal parents are against them. A proposal to change the school’s vaccine policy to require immunizations for all students is enough to fully upend the community’s seemingly foundational sense of peace and harmony.
Spector’s dialogue is brilliantly (and frustratingly) realistic in capturing a certain type of personality who talks almost exclusively in clipped sentence fragments. These Bay Area parents are so aware of (and self-conscious about) their own privilege that they constantly trail off or cut themselves off as a way to undercut their own words and soften their arguments. At the same time, they can’t stop talking over one another, even as they’re continually apologizing for doing so. They aren’t going to let their desire to avoid stepping on anyone’s toes override their entitlement to be heard.
Spector’s immense talent for crafting dialogue comes to a head when the executive board opens their meeting up to a livestream discussion with all of the school’s parents. As the principal, Don (John Resenhouse), tries to lead the meeting and the parents chime in with their own thoughts, the livestream’s chat is projected onto the wall behind them. Despite Don’s pleas that everyone remain civil, that chat quickly devolves into online carnage, with parents hurling the sorts of insults you’d expect from the most trollish internet comment sections.
The timing of these three simultaneous conversations is impeccable, with the board’s concerns punctuated perfectly with vitriolic insults and one relentless thumbs-up emoji that probably gets the biggest laughs of the entire play. (Stage managers don’t usually get shout-outs in reviews, but I have to assume that in addition to the stellar cast and Darren Sextro’s direction, much of that brilliant timing comes down to Ari Hernandez’s cue-calling.)
The entire small cast is superb, but Resenhouse is a standout as Don, working tirelessly to keep things calm as the parental storm swirls around him. In her recent turn in Unicorn Theatre’s Casey and Diana, Cinnamon Schultz’s showed she has the ability to bring the house down with one devastating monologue. She has now proven that once again here. Spector is distinctly writing from a pro-vaccine perspective, but when Schultz’s Suzanne gets a chance to open up about her staunch anti-vax views, it’s enough to make anyone—fellow character or audience member—let their guard down and reconsider their stance, even just momentarily. Her bare vulnerability is devastating, especially held up against the dehumanizing trolling we just saw the parents indulge in.
Aside from one perfect closing line, I’m not sure what changes were made between the play’s 2018 debut and its West End revival in 2022. But what Spector has produced is a phenomenal reflection of a time he could not have foreseen we would all endure together so shortly after its creation. Eureka Day captures the pain and fear of the pandemic, along with the social tumult of realizing how different our core values can be, even within our own circles. At the same time, the play is about community, and how dedicated we all are to keeping those we love safe—even if our perception of the threats at hand differs. It is also, maybe most impressively of all, riotously funny.
“Eureka Day,” a production of Kansas City Actors Theatre, runs through September 27 at City Stage, on the lower level of Union Station, 30 W Pershing Rd, Kansas City, MO. For more information, visit www.kcactors.org.
