In the New Broadway Comedy Eureka Day, Concerned Parents Argue About Vaccines

For her newest project, Eureka Day, Broadway favorite Amber Gray signed on before she even read the script. At a recent meet-the-press event, the original Persephone in Hadestown told Playbill that she said yes to doing the play because she wanted to work with director Anna D. Shapiro. But then after she read Eureka Day, she found it "brilliant." Eureka Day is currently in previews at Broadway's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, with an opening night of December 16.

The play, which also stars Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch and two-time Tony nominee Jessica Hecht, takes place in a liberal Berkeley, California, grade school where there's a mumps outbreak. The board, made up of local parents, has to decide how to broach the controversial topic of vaccines. Notably, the play takes place in 2018, in the halcyon days before the pandemic, where vaccination skepticism was a nascent movement.

Said Gray: "Having a six and nine-year-old, my partner and I really studied both sides of the argument before we decided what to do. But in many ways, it's not a vaccine play at all. It's a play about a community, where their values align for the most part, but they disagree on this one subject, and they have to really find a way forward." Gray plays Carina, a newcomer to the Berkeley community.

Playwright Jonathan Spector, who is making his Broadway debut with the play, says that Eureka Day was inspired by his own experience living in Berkeley and discovering his friends were vaccine skeptics. "I had conversations with friends or acquaintances who were at least as smart and well educated as me, with whom I shared all the same politics and worldview, and then found out they did not vaccinate their kids. And I was so curious about how it was that we could agree on everything about the world, except for this one thing, where we seem to live in different realities. And so that sort of sent me down the rabbit hole of chasing this."

Anna D. Shapiro and Jonathan Spector Heather Gershonowitz

Director Shapiro admits she is very picky about what she chooses to direct, saying, "The question always is, do I want to leave home, leave my kids, leave my husband?" She said that she was drawn to the play for its compassionate portrayal of "people moving through this impossible situation" with plenty of meaty material for actors to "sink their teeth into."

Though the play may deal with a topic that seems fraught these days, vaccinations, it is also a comedy.

"Literally, the language of the play is so meticulous. It's like a piece of sculpture, the way he's laid it out on the page. It is deeply, deeply realistic in terms of both the way people talk and also the ideas, the kind of fluidity of ideas," says Jessica Hecht, who plays Suzanne, a mom who decides to not vaccinate her kids. "I'm loving dealing with the script that goes from something very, very funny and very light with real human contact, to something dangerously dark and sad."

Though Eureka Day features people who believe in vaccinations and people who do not believe in vaccinations, the play is clear, this isn't an "us versus them" story. It's a story of how a community makes a decision that affects everyone, but not everyone will be happy with. And how a community can, however imperfectly, hold space for many different viewpoints.

Though Middleditch is known for HBO's Silicon Valley, he clarified that while his character in Eureka Day works in tech, "this isn't just like another Richard Hendricks from Silicon Valley." Especially since he's playing a concerned father. Middleditch was drawn to the play because of how "clever" and "sophisticated" it was. But what the actor, who is also making his Broadway debut, has been enjoying the most has been the diversity of viewpoints represented in Eureka Day. As he explained: "We're increasingly finding that people...live kind of with different realities, different facts, different truths about their world that they know to be true. And this is a play about people who are trying to make space and hold room for all competing viewpoints."

Eureka Day previously had an Off-Off-Broadway run and a London run. And before this new run, the production had to do a quick recast when Zoë Chao stepped away due to a scheduling conflict and Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz (from ABC's Scandal) stepped in. It's also her Broadway debut, and as she exclaims, "I'm loving everything. I'm loving everything!" When asked what she enjoys about her first Broadway play, Yakura-Kurtz reveled in how complex the story is: "This play lives in gray. Everybody is a human being. Everybody's an asshole. It really shows us ourselves in a way that I think people will recognize themselves up on stage, and they will recognize their neighbors."

Comedy legend Bill Irwin, who plays a Eureka Day employee who has the unfortunate job of wrangling the warring parents, agreed with that sentiment. "Why do this play right now? Because it is not a pandemic play. It's a play, I think, that invites everybody watching it to see themselves..If we can manage to invite audiences to sit there and go, 'I see myself in the play,' then we will have done our jobs to a certain extent."

Eureka Day is currently running in a limited engagement until January 19, 2025.

MTC's production is produced by special arrangement with Sonia Friedman Productions (which co-presented the 2022 London run), Wagner Johnson Productions, and Seaview.

The production also features scenic design by Todd Rosenthal, costume design by Clint Ramos, lighting design by Jen Schriever, original music and sound design by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen, projection design by David Bengali, and intimacy and sensitivity coordination by Ann C. James. Kevin Bertolacci is serving as production stage manager.

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