Eureka Day (Jonathan Spector)
If you never take aim at your own then you’re not a good comedian. Many of us cheer if someone uses wit to tear down the Other Side (whoever that may be,) but the necessary thing that comedy does is make us think about our own contradictions, blindspots, and hypocrisies.
This becomes all the more important as a group becomes homogenized. Homogeneity breeds blindspots and poor thinking. We all have an idea of who the average theater audience is, and it’s not the cross-section of America. So while it is good to have comedic works like The Play the Goes Wrong (which is all for fun,) or Quixote Nuevo (which does a great job of building empathy,) the most necessary comedies, the ones we should celebrate, and the ones I hope Pronoia has a hand in creating, are the ones that look critically at the liberal experience and mindset. It’s why I love Nicky Silver’s The Altruists and it’s why Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day is a great work.
Synopsis
We follow the executive committee of an ultra-liberal private school in San Francisco. It’s a group that prides itself in how inclusive, how thoughtful, and how consensus building it is. Then a mumps outbreak occurs in the significantly non-vaccinated children population and it brings to the fore lots of questions about community vs individualism and what is safety, tolerance, and respect.
One of the chief conflicts is between the board president who is a founding family of the school and a new parent with New Ideas.
As a Producer
Jonathan Spector must have given himself a high-five at his good timing while the Covid-pandemic was happening. Eureka Day was first performed in 2018, and manages to crystalize an attitude before it disappeared forever. It’s easy to forget that before Covid the most vocal anti-vaccine community were highly liberal folks in the bay area, and Eureka Day manages to predict almost every conversation that happened around public health in the last two years, but with the politics ostensibly reversed. To me, this is a great way of reminding everyone that our views are assailable and that our opinions can change wildly based on non-evidence based thinking. It’s a wonderful, accidental monument to human foibles.
On top of that the play is hysterically funny with well drawn characters. I have enough faith in the audience to be able to engage in the satire without taking offense at it, and as long as they can do that I think the play should find a welcome home in any city.
Much like Deer this is exactly the sort of play Pronoia would produce, all the more so because the social themes are more relevant to what I want to create than the bizarreness of Deer, but the cast is mostly older (mid 40s to 50s) than the artists we work with currently.
As a Designer
The play is straightforward, refreshingly taking place in one location, the school library, but showcasing effective transformation over time. It features functional projection for a livestream scene, which is a welcome challenge, and there should be enough room within the tone of the play for almost every department to creatively express themselves.
As a Writer
This is exactly the kind of show I want to write: it’s bracing, funny, and satirical. It doesn’t back down from the sort of people who are going to watch it, and it shows characterization subtly and through well-executed moments. The ending is a little abrupt, but otherwise this is the precise sort of work I want to do, and which I think I’ve failed to do in the past (through many unperformed sketches, and even the more clumsy pieces like Basically Apartheid and Ally Theater from Violence is the Best Medicine.)
