Just in time, laughter is making a big comeback on Broadway. Better yet, it comes in several varieties.
For catty yowling, check out Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard, wringing necks in “Death Becomes Her.” For helpless giggles, there’s Cole Escola as that cabaret legend Mary Todd Lincoln in “Oh, Mary!” And if you enjoy the hysteria of family fireworks, “Cult of Love” should leave you gasping.
But the funniest character now on Broadway isn’t even a human being — or not exactly. Getting the biggest belly laughs in Jonathan Spector’s “Eureka Day,” which opened on Monday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, is a yellow thumbs-up emoji.
The emoji appears — chipper then aggravating then weirdly insidious — in a livestream meeting of parents and executive board members at Eureka Day, an upscale private school in Berkeley, Calif. As Don, the principal, tries to handle a looming crisis, using every banality at his new-age disposal, the conversation in the chat veers correspondingly out of control. His attempt to “unpack” issues calmly has instead disgorged a torrent of personal attacks, vulgar language and childish invective. By the end of the scene, the third of the play’s quick seven, the thumb seems like a different finger entirely.
Spector’s hilarious poison-pen satire of educational wokeism has led us to that point with great care. A Manhattan Theater Club production, directed bracingly by Anna D. Shapiro, it begins, in 2018, with a kind of dramaturgical canapé to whet our appetites for the main dish. As the lights come up on the school’s bright library, prominently featuring a social justice collection, Don (Bill Irwin) is leading the board in a discussion about a proposed addition to the drop-down menu on the prospective parent application. Should it include “transracial adoptee” as an option among the many other ethnic identities offered?
The point is argued with elaborate courtesy bordering on incomprehensibility. Meiko (Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz) says “the term itself is not offensive,” but Suzanne (Jessica Hecht) thinks it might be offensive “when you contextualize it in that way.” Eli (Thomas Middleditch) feels that failing to add the term would amount to a kind of erasure, given that “our Core Operating Principle here is that everyone should Feel Seen by this community.”
To which Suzanne replies, “There’s no benefit in Feeling Seen if you’re simultaneously Being Othered, right?”
Only Carina (Amber Gray), who fills the seat given each year to a new parent, speaks like a normal human being. Omitting the new designation “actually sounds right to me,” she says, because adoption is not an ethnicity. But she gets cut off by the mansplaining Eli.
A former tech bro who recently cashed in, Eli has mastered the new lingo but not his need to dominate. Carina is a Black parent whom the white board members blithely assume must get financial aid. Meiko is a single mother having an affair with Eli, who is married. Suzanne, one of the school’s founding parents, has a fiercely disowned aura of privilege; rather than exert it openly, she makes dolphin sounds of frustration when crossed. And Don reads Rumi aloud — enough said.
The satire is a bit broad at the start. With everyone holding space for something, seemingly leaving little room for anything else, the wild periphrasis of the dialogue begins to feel like a hot needle in wax. By the time Don gently informs Carina, who has made the mistake of referring to her son as “him,” that “we make every effort to wherever possible to only use Gender Neutral Pronouns when referring to a student,” you may feel that this track is going nowhere.
But it does. At an emergency meeting four days later, an outbreak of mumps at the school opens unexpected divisions among the board members, who cover their shock at one another’s positions with preposterously foggy language. The chatters during a subsequent livestream meeting, arguing over vaccine requirements, do not. Acting almost as the suppressed inner monologue of the main characters, the scroll of their projected comments (“Were you dropped on your head as a child?”) is the exposed id of a community that professes perfect consideration of differing opinions but is actually a hotbed of intolerance.
Spector undertakes something quite tricky here: a perspectival triple axel. The opening salvo of broad satire that has now become a broadside, preaching mostly to a New York choir that agrees with the vaxxers and ridicules the antis, soon flips once more. In the ensuing scenes, “Eureka Day” asks us to consider that people speak and believe as they do for real reasons, and that even differing profoundly, they may achieve good things together. (Eureka Day students are said to be easy to pick out at soccer games because “they’re the ones who cheer when the other team scores.”) In short, we are asked to credit fully the humanity of those with whom we disagree.
Though that seems like an exceedingly timely request, and a sometimes vexing one, the play was not written for this moment. It was first performed in 2018, at the Aurora Theater Company in Berkeley, and then Off Broadway in 2019, in a production by the downtown company Colt Coeur. But events have caught up with it, and Spector has made changes that take advantage of recent history. Forwarding the setting by a year lets him underline the Covid-era public health implications of the story and provide a knockout curtain line.
That the intimate downtown version, directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt, instead ended softly did not make the play less incisive. But Shapiro’s production has been majorly and satisfyingly scaled up for Broadway. The library is much bigger and brighter (sets by Todd Rosenthal, lights by Jen Schriever); the costumes (by Clint Ramos) telegraphic in their sociology and the bassoon-heavy interstitial music (by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen) almost cartoonishly apt. The cast, too, hits the sweet spot between broad and deep, with Irwin, a clown by training, especially good at fatuousness, and Hecht at steely ditziness. In a slightly underwritten role, Gray beautifully counters the others with sly wit.
Whether you can take seriously the good intentions of characters so hung up on what they say regardless of what they do is another matter. I couldn’t quite get there, not when they are painted so broadly to ensure the laughs. To avoid its “extremely problematic portrayal of Native Peoples” and a “host of Colonialist Issues,” the school’s production of “Peter Pan,” was reset in outer space. Reasonable ideas, ridiculous outcomes.
That’s fine within the world of the play, as sharp a biopsy of wokeness and obtuseness as you could want, needling people on both sides of the issue. But IRL, I was left wondering, strangely for a critic: If everyone’s point of view is valid, is anyone’s?
The post Review: In ‘Eureka Day,’ Holding Space for Those You Hate appeared first on New York Times.
