“You possibly can all the time spot a Eureka Day child, as a result of at soccer video games, they’re those who cheer when the opposite group scores.”
So says Carina (Amber Grey), the father or mother of a brand new enrollee at Berkeley’s Eureka Day faculty, explaining what had been her pondering in putting her son there. Up to now, like-minded members of the viewers on the Manhattan Theatre Membership’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre have been ushered into the world of this swaddlingly well-meaning establishment by way of acquainted signifiers of liberal finest intentions. The college library the place the manager committee meets is bedecked with a “Berkeley Stands United In opposition to Hate” poster and pictures of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Michelle Obama, and Maya Angelou. Longtime faculty booster Suzanne (Jessica Hecht) swans about, so filled with empathy that she can’t sit nonetheless, in diaphanous hippie-by-way-of-Eileen Fisher clothes. And everyone seems to be dedicated to creating the symbolically fraught 2018-2019 faculty 12 months one in all actually listening to one another. “We solely make selections by consensus,” says Meiko (Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz), one other faculty father or mother. Sounds splendid — or, no less than, idealistic. Which implies the identical factor, proper?
However whereas the children could also be cheering for each other, their mother and father can’t fairly get there. Carina, not merely a breath of contemporary air as a brand new Eureka father or mother however a Black girl, would possibly appear to have a good quantity to share together with her white counterparts on the committee; certainly, Don, the pinnacle of faculty (Invoice Irwin) tells her that “we welcome your distinctive perspective.” It’s onerous to not discover, then, that she will get minimize off considerably ostentatiously by her white fellow father or mother Eli (Thomas Middleditch), who seeks to “reframe” the dialog earlier than Carina will get to make her level. And that’s earlier than the dialog even turns contentious.
Written by Jonathan Spector — a playwright based mostly in California’s East Bay space, the place the present is about — and directed by Anna D. Shapiro, “Eureka Day” is a cleverly staged social satire, one which earns sufficient goodwill to buoy it whilst sure of its thrives don’t fairly land. The committee, and the college, is finally riven by a debate over the college’s coverage on vaccines — which is to say, its lack of a coverage, as Eureka’s laissez-faire perspective in direction of mandated photographs results in a mumps outbreak. However the illness that “Eureka Day” diagnoses, by way of shrewd character work and deft, economical bits of plot growth, remains to be extra contagious.
Take, for example, a set piece through which the committee, Don and the 4 mother and father designated to help him in his administration of the college, hosts a teleconference name through the faculty’s closure as a result of mumps outbreak. This closure may very well be foreshortened, or restricted solely to the unvaccinated kids, if the group may simply agree — however little probability of that.
This sequence, the present’s comedian excessive level, represents directly a deft piece of stagecraft that, within the cacophony of offended feedback projected behind the heads of Don and firm, turns into a intelligent comedian dissection of the general public sq. within the age of Zoom. Neglect consensus. Confronted with the implications of their very own willingness to dwell and let dwell — a virus, in spite of everything, doesn’t actually care in regards to the cautious makes an attempt to weigh all events’ opinions in terms of vaccinating their children — the group dissolves into typed-out recriminations, all whereas Don pleads for calm. There’s a sure poetry to the truth that the viewers response to the feedback proven on the display behind the committee drowns out the actors’ makes an attempt to quell the insanity, making the actors at occasions inaudible. (The interaction between actors and onscreen textual content is exactly timed sufficient to make holding for applause unimaginable.) With that stated, it additionally signifies that a great portion of the play’s essential flip is, by design or miscalculation, near-impossible to make out.
However this can be a small critique of a present that will get a lot else proper. A play in regards to the social mores of left-liberal mother and father within the late 2010s might need landed with a thud at a time when the nationwide temper appears to so completely have repudiated their vanities and their values alike. The second would possibly appear to have handed — and, in addition to, a part of the difficulty with an In This Home We Imagine signal, from a comic book perspective, is: The place does one even start?
Spector’s reply appears to be: Begin small, and from a human perspective. We get to know every of the committe members nicely earlier than they’re confronted with actual drama, and, by way of their little interpersonal tiffs and misstatements, they arrive to really feel, every of them, like somebody one may meet on the proper farmer’s market or canvassing journey. Meiko and Eli are distracting themselves by way of midlife, whereas Carina is a bushel of finest intentions slowly realizing that life was higher at a faculty the place children and oldsters alike may no less than be sincere about being in it for themselves. And Don and Suzanne are the present’s two deftest comedian creations; in a deeply proficient ensemble, Irwin’s manner with stammering uncertainty and Hecht’s insinuating niceness are the 2 most elegantly deployed weapons. Don, notionally accountable for the place, is so frightened about offending any attainable stakeholder that he defaults to an eloquently defended inaction. And Suzanne, a tactician in clogs, takes benefit of Don’s fecklessness to argue her anti-vaccine place from a spot of instinct and emotion that no marshalling of information can fight — not in a circle that runs in keeping with consensus, anyway.
“Eureka Day” doesn’t have a solution for tips on how to repair this sorry state of affairs, however that it poses the query makes it a play with an uncommon quantity on its thoughts, and a high-quality evening of theater that can gasoline post-show dialog lengthy after the curtain falls. It’s involved, ultimately, with at least the state of how liberals converse to 1 one other, in 2018 and proper now — and the impossibility of creating ahead motion when each voice is allowed its flip. “ALL POV = VALID,” Don writes on a whiteboard on the play’s midpoint, urged on by Suzanne, who’s offended at feeling unheard.
Carina has an objection: “Everybody’s standpoint is just not equally legitimate, like, all of the time,” she says. The mastery of “Eureka Day” lies in the truth that one solely realizes a beat after it occurs that Carina is minimize off as she speaks, first by Suzanne after which by Don, who asks her to “let this sit for now.” We’ve been ushered, steadily and utterly, right into a world the place each voice issues, in fact, however some — these of an institution class who need to be certain everybody is actually welcomed — matter greater than ours.
