A Vaccination Conflagration

Jonathan Spector's Broadway comedy 'Eureka Day' follows a California private school that is thrown into crisis by an outbreak of the mumps

- CHARLES ISHERWOOD

To vax or not to vax? That is the question roiling a meeting of a T committee assembled in a school library in the piquant comedy "Eureka Day," by Jonathan Spector, being presented on Broadway by Manhattan Theatre Club after an earlier run off-Broadway.

The play is set in 2018, so it is not intended to directly reflect any current discourse about the efficacy or, as some see it, the potential dangers of vaccines. But in the wake of the pandemic it inevitably feels freshly and discomfitingly topical.

The title is the name of a private elementary school in Berkeley, Calif., a city well-known as a flag-waving bastion of progressive liberalism. (Interestingly, the play was commissioned and first staged there.) The library's walls are plastered with posters encouraging the kids to heed the words of Maya Angelou and Michelle Obama.

But the head of the committee, Bill Irwin's Don, and its most vocal longtime member, Jessica Hecht's Suzanne, are white, as is Eli (Thomas Middleditch), who made a fortune in Silicon Valley ("like the tenth employee at Google," Suzanne says, or is it Facebook?), and whose voice has the power of a bulging bank account behind it. They are joined by the AsianAmerican Meiko (Chelsea YakuraKurtz) and the new member, Carina (Amber Gray, formerly of "Hadestown"), who is black.

At the first meeting we see, they tangle over the knotty issue of what terms to include on the expansive list of identities families applying to the school are allowed to choose from. Should "Transracial Adoptee" be listed alongside "First Nations comma Indigenous and Aboriginal comma Native American heritage"?