Directed by Craig Baldwin, Eureka Day is a side-splitting critique of performative wokeness in a wealthy Californian private school. Following a school board as it navigates a mumps outbreak, kindness, civility, and objectivity are all tested. Jumping on the bandwagon to laugh at political correctness is certainly not revolutionary, however, beneath the jokes about safe spaces lies a sharp insight into just how fragile our most taken-for-granted ideas are.
The set is a comfortable primary school classroom. There are small colorful plastic chairs, a hungry caterpillar stuffed animal, and a donated library featuring a social justice section. The atmosphere is warm and welcoming when the five parents enter the stage for the first school board meeting.
The meeting opens with a debate about whether to add a “transracial” category to the enrollment application form. Everyone spends more time constantly affirming that all perspectives are welcome rather than actually having the discussion. Both the inclusion of the new category and its omission are deemed partially offensive.
While hilarious and a critic of both the right and left, the play’s focus on the overly woke is a bit disengaged from reality. The archetypes in the room reflect that disconnect. Don (Jamie Oxenbould) is a wholesome old tree hugger who reads Rumi at the start of every meeting, and Suzanne (Katrina Retallick) is a suburban blond mum whose obsession with natural scones is somewhat undermined by her forced plastic smile. Although I am sure these people exist in the most privileged parts of California, I could never imagine even the most woke university student advocating for a version of Peter Pan set in space to remove references to colonialism and ensure that all students get to fly. The overacting, however, was brilliant, and any disbelief was diffused by laughter.
According to the school’s bylaws, the board must reach consensus on all decisions. The majority never wins. Perhaps the play’s best insight into these group settings is how unequal they always are, despite the emphasis on fairness. Carina’s (Branden Christine) job as a doctor means she has to leave meetings early, while Suzanne seems to have infinite time to argue. Similarly, Eli (Christian Charisiou), a Facebook executive, always manages to talk over others, standing up to gesticulate his ideas.
It’s hard not to comment at this point on how American this premise is. Only a country obsessed with school choice and parental rights would let random members of a ‘community’ run a school educating hundreds of students.
All niceties fall away when a letter arrives from the health department informing the parents that a student has contracted mumps. Hard lines are drawn as the board has to decide whether to mandate the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine when the school reopens after a mandatory quarantine. Carina leads a petition to mandate vaccination, while Suzanne goes on a crusade against all vaccines, revealing her child tragically died due to the side effects of the MMR vaccine.
The comedic highlight of the show was a Zoom town hall. Combining tech issues with a comment section that descended into Facebook-style chaos, the audience was rolling. Godwin’s law, the conjecture that all online arguments will lead to an inevitable analogy to fascism, held.
It’s often difficult for a comedy to quickly flip to serious commentary, but Eureka Day manages to show the real damage of vaccine skepticism with care. The school transforms into a hospital wing as it’s revealed that Eli’s son is in critical condition. Real children die and suffer permanent injury when parents make mistakes. The actors in these scenes also tone it down, taking a valuable moment to reflect on previous conversations where they may have overstepped.
During all the passionate debate, the play’s best observation is how vulnerable good-faith people are to disinformation. As Suzanne rightly points out in one of her anti-vaxxer tirades, the large pharmaceutical companies that lobby governments to support vaccines have lied to the public and doctored studies to push pain pills and other dangerous drugs. Putting a virus particle inside young children is intuitively scary. Eureka Day asks its privileged audience why they are so trusting of medicine, but more importantly, why they are so confident in dismissing Suzanne as crazy.
While vaccines are revealed to be effective in controlling the mumps outbreak and protecting most of the students, no audience member, no matter how educated, is immune to Suzanne’s dangerous position. As May (Deborah An) screams in one of the show’s most powerful moments, “I believe in human fallibility.”
This tension between science and the personal reality of Suzanne’s experience reveals a wonderful irony. Although a consensus discussion revolving around affirmations of feelings is easy to make fun of, it’s often all we have to bridge impossible divides. The community of a wealthy Berkeley private school may be manufactured, but these divides exist everywhere in diverse societies.
Unfortunately, the play’s ending undermines that message. When Eli offers to donate a large sum of money if the board mandates vaccination, Dom finds a loophole in the bylaws that allows everyone to bypass Suzanne and any need for consensus. This theatrical deus ex machina is a good outcome for the students, but allows the script to avoid confronting the genuine issue it set up: what do you do when people have to compromise? For parents running an American private school, fiscal responsibility will always trump consensus, despite all the affirmations otherwise.
Baldwin, in his introduction to the show, lamented that after COVID, “we tend to just avoid the conversations” rather than thinking “it was possible to convince each other.” It’s a shame Eureka Day ends up using the same tactic. The curtains rise on another school year, another passage of Rumi, and the parents pretend it’s all business as usual.
Eureka Day is playing at the Seymour Centre until 21st June.
