Trump’s second presidency will change our lives, though the details of how are not yet clear. This was on playwright Jonathan Spector’s mind the morning of November 8th ahead of the Broadway debut of his play Eureka Day. Directed by Anna D. Shapiro at Manhattan Theatre Club, the play, set in 2018 in a progressive Berkeley elementary school, faces a mumps outbreak and attempts to navigate the crisis while grappling with conflicting views on truth, and responsibility vis a vis vaccination mandates. Spector, a Berkeley resident for many years, wrote the play after the first election of Trump to explore how a society can function when basic truths are contested. Originally a local commentary, Eureka Day gained unforeseen relevance during the COVID-19 pandemic, which halted its planned productions. Since then, it has been staged globally, but its timing is now even more striking: premiering just weeks after the election. Spector claims that writing a play in response to current events is a “fool’s errand” and yet Spector’s Broadway premiere coincided with the Presidential Election.“Eureka Day” has become a prescient reflection of our era—an exception proving that truth is often stranger than fiction. Read on to hear about the lifespan of Eureka Day, its unintentional relevancy, and the theatricality of vaccinations.
This interview has been edited for both length and clarity.
Eve Bromberg: Let’s start with inspiration! What was the inspiration for “Eureka Day?”
Jonathan Spector: I had been in conversation with The Aurora Theatre in Berkeley about a commission for some time. Because it’s a local theater, I wanted to create a decidedly Berkeley play. California had been the state with one of the loosest school vaccination requirements, but an outbreak of measles at Disneyland in 2014 changed this state’s requirements to some of the strictest. The discussion of vaccines had very much been in the zeitgeist. I also had a few experiences with fellow parents– similar to me in educational background and political worldview– where I discovered they didn’t vaccinate their kids. It was strange to realize you can agree with somebody about everything except for a topic where the other person seems to live in an entirely different reality. Trying to understand that dynamic was the initial impulse of “Eureka Day” followed by a lot of research and interviews. While COVID and Trump changed the valence of vaccinations in the US, before the COVID-19 vaccine, rich liberal areas, like Marin County, were some of the communities with the highest rates of unvaccinated. That tension was fascinating. The play premiered at The Aurora in the spring of 2018 and then had a few productions in 2019, one with Colt Coeur in New York, one in DC, and one in Philadelphia. There were others planned but COVID pushed everything to a halt.
EB: So when you wrote this play, you surely were not thinking about the scale in which it may be germane?
JS: No, not at all. One always hopes for some kind of relevancy for their play, but I couldn’t plan for the kind we’re facing this week where RFK Jr. may be appointed to be in charge of “vaccine safety,” which is a terrifying place to be. The play is set in a small private progressive elementary school where the characters are the school’s principal and the Board of Trustees. Because they believe in progressive education, they make all their decisions by consensus– even at the board level. When an outbreak of mumps at the school occurs, it becomes difficult to reach a consensus. They can’t agree on how to respond to the situation because they can’t agree on what’s true. I began writing this leading up to the 2016 election when I was trying to wrap my head around how deeply it felt that half the country lived in a different reality than I did, so the play is about vaccine skepticism, but more broadly a way to explore the question of how you can make and live in a society with people if you can’t agree with what’s true. I think before COVID, at least in the critical response, people could see that in the play, but in a couple of productions we had right when the theater was coming back [from COVID-19], all anyone saw was the play as a metaphor for COVID. I hope the distance between this production and the pandemic will help audience members see the larger questions moving the narrative forward.
EB: What is the essential theatrical element of this play?
JS: In the grandest sense it’s the basic theater experience of watching a community come together and wrestle with something. It’s a naturalistic play in terms of form, except for one scene which weirdly feels prescient now, as much as the topic of vaccines, where the Board decides after the outbreak that they can’t have, as they would like to, a gathering of the whole community, so they’re going to do it as a live stream conversation where community members can type their questions in for the Board to answer. As you might imagine, this does not go well. People responded intensely to this scene before COVID, but we now have much more personal relationships with the mediated nature of communicating online than when I wrote this play. This scene came out of also spending too much time on crazy internet message boards and seeing how nasty people are to each other on there. There was no way to talk about an issue so enacted online without bringing that reality into the play. But, I couldn’t make the characters act horribly to each other, not only because I didn’t want to, but because that’s not how we are with people when we’re in the same room with them. We only lash out in that way when we don’t see others as whole, real, people. I’m not sure I entirely understood that scene when I wrote it, and I’m not sure I grasp why it works as it does even now, but the scene has an intense audience effect: the online conversation takes over. In early performances, I was worried the audience wouldn’t follow along with the lines and the online comments, but the audience response to the comments was so wild that the play onstage became inaudible. It was a very strange and telling experience.
EB: One of the production photos from your very positive Ben Bradley review of your 2019 Colt Coeur production of the play shows an NPR tote bag at the feet of one of the characters during the school’s board meeting. Another element of this narrative is the shortsightedness of well-intentioned individuals unable to see the potential consequences of their beliefs. That also seems rather theatrical.
JS: I’ve been talking with our Director Anna D. Shapiro trying to process the election, not that I’ve processed it at all. We’re now in a different reality and we have to ask, as a team, what this play means in this new world. I don’t know, as I have no idea what this next presidency will look like. However, there is a reality that the tools of smart, caring, thoughtful, well-intentioned individuals were ill-equipped for certain conflicts and that’s perhaps some of why we’re here now. Watching the run-through yesterday, that’s what I saw the play as being about, which is not what I thought two weeks ago.
EB: Where does “Eureka Day” fit in with the rest of your body of work?
JS: The next play often comes out of the previous one, oftentimes in pursuing something different in terms of structure or style. I wrote “This Much I Know” after “Eureka Day,” which was the product of reading Daniel Kahneman’s work around decision-making and decision-making biases. The questions I asked in “Eureka Day” led me to wonder how we make decisions. But, “This Much,” is a very different play in terms of form. Three actors play twenty characters. If there is some unifying element of my work, it’s that I normally start from an experience or question that I don’t understand that I will pursue in the writing of the play. When I first lived in New York, I was an assistant director and research dramaturge on some of The Civilians’ first plays. Their company method very much surrounded the idea of finding a question and then going out into the world and interviewing people to see if we can answer the question with a play, or at least understand better. I didn’t start writing plays until some years later, but I think that approach embedded itself in me.
EB: How did this production come to be? How has it been to work with Manhattan Theatre Club and your director, Anna D. Shapiro?
JS: Lynne [Meadow] saw the play in London in the fall of 2022 at The Old Vic and liked it and was interested in doing it in New York. It’s been great working with them all the way through and the team has been amazing. I’ve been very involved in three productions, three distinct productions, and gotten to see four or five others including one in German at the National Theatre of Austria. I have so much knowledge of the play, not just from writing it, but being able to see it in so many contexts, and languages and it’s really exciting to be able to bring all of that experience to New York matched with such high-caliber talent. Anna is an incredible director, particularly at creating ensembles, which is not surprising considering her work with Steppenwolf, and to have actors like Jessica Hecht and Bill Irwin who I’ve been watching in things my whole life, or what feels like, it’s a real privilege and surreal. We have a room of really kind and lovely people.
EB: How does it feel to have a Broadway debut?
JS: It’s been a long and twisty road to getting to Broadway with a pandemic in the middle. The Colt Coeur production was very well received, Ben Brantley gave it a positive review, as you mentioned. Once that happened, there was interest from a world foreign to me, like commercial producers. I’ve been sitting on the idea that it could go to Broadway for four years. On the one hand, it’s been a long time for that idea and possibility has floated out there, but then it’s also the difference between it being a possibility and happening. Thus far, being in rehearsal, it hasn’t felt all that different than any other production experience of the play, except for how consistently tremendous everyone is at their job, but I imagine it’ll start to feel quite different once performances begin.
EB: Did you always see “Eureka Day” as appealing to a Broadway audience?
JS: Oh no, not at all. I wrote it for a theater in Berkeley about people in Berkeley. It was very well received there, but I had no idea if anybody outside of Berkeley would relate or be interested in the play, or if people were just excited to be able to see themselves onstage. It was surprising to find that people connected to the play around the world. There have been two productions in Australia and a couple now in Germany. This was not at all something I expected or aimed for, not that I’m sure it’s something you can aim for, but it’s been a wild and unexpected journey.
EB: How do you measure success as a playwright?
JS: Success is so tricky. On the one hand, it’s getting to do the work. But also, it’s getting to do the work with the people you want to work with at a level where everyone is supported and paid enough to produce their best work possible. But also, and this is a result of my work on decision-making, we adjust to new baselines quickly. What we’ve aspired to suddenly becomes our reality. It’s sort of like Zeno’s Paradox. We’re always moving forward but we never arrive. My goal for this experience was to enjoy it and try not to think about what comes next.
EB: Does the success of “Eureka Day” speak to something larger about where interests lie in American Theater today? Are we craving political portraits of our recent past and caricatured portrayals?
JS: These are not caricature portrayals, which is very important to highlight.Because the play ends up in such serious territory, it doesn’t quite work if you do that if you lean in caricature. There’s a cheap humor you can get from making fun of people, but there’s a much deeper humor to be gained from the feeling of recognition in the audience, what the play wants to be. I don’t think I can speak to the current trends of American Theater, but I think it’s a fool’s errand to write a play in response to the immediate present moment that wants to have something to say about the present moment. It takes a long time to write a play and even longer to get it produced if you’re lucky enough to have it produced at all. By the time that play is produced, we’re not going to be in that place anymore. When plays do hit the cultural moment, it’s sort of a coincidence. I started writing this play eight years ago.
Previews for Eureka Day start November 25th at The Samuel J. Friedman Theater. Read more about the production, and buy tickets here.
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