Homing in on California antivax parents isn’t Swiftian satire, Jonathan Spector’s play Eureka Day proves despite moments of inspired hilarity. 

 

The setting is the Eureka Day private school in Berkeley, where the school board is dealing with a student’s case of the mumps. The meeting is led by the 60ish Don and includes 30ish parents Eli and Meiko—who are having an affair they think is masked by their children’s playdates—along with longtime board member Suzanne and the newest member, Carina, whose son attends the school.

 

As the group’s discussions start civilly but turn more argumentative, Spector raises the specter of ultraliberal parents acting selfishly under the guise of “protecting the kids” as well as dangling the threat of fascism due to stringent school rules. While funny, the play often resorts to obviousness, underlined in its most celebrated scene, an online town hall meeting in which the board members—and especially the bumbling Don—try but fail to preserve decorum as comments from parents keep popping up, exploding from mild disagreement to nastiness and conspiracy theories, even dropping the “n” word (Nazi) amid pointing out others’ ignorance.

 

In Anna D. Shapiro’s lively production, set on Todd Rosenthal’s skillfully decorated school library set, we read the comments scrolling by on a large screen above the five board members, who talk among themselves. It’s certainly amusing, like a decent Saturday Night Live sketch, but goes on too long as Spector tries to one up himself to diminishing returns. (Audiences don’t agree—they were practically falling out of their seats, as if the ushers had passed out laughing gas.) It also points up the fact that these five characters are bland stereotypes who literally fade into the background during this sequence. 

 

A couple of scenes do help humanize them. The first has Eli and Meiko at his son’s hospital room after contracting a severe case of the mumps, likely from Meiko’s daughter, which lays bare the adults’ tangled relationship, as when Meiko shows Eli texts his wife sent her: the word “whore,” over and over. (“She probably just like cut and pasted,” he weakly retorts.) In the second, Suzanne tells Carina about a long-ago family tragedy that forever colored her view of vaccines. It’s a commendable attempt by Spector to give Suzanne—fast becoming the play’s villain—a reason for her rejection of science, but it comes off as too neat and pat.

 

Shapiro’s savvy direction couches the increasingly surreal lunacy over vaccines in a much needed reality, and she stages Spector’s final, easy jokes—one visual, one verbal—with an economy that helps them land effectively. Too bad the overacting of Bill Irwin (Don), Thomas Middleditch (Eli) and especially Jessica Hecht (Suzanne) undermines the jokes, although it’s always fun seeing Irwin’s physical adroitness get a laugh when Don hesitantly follows Meiko after she storms out of a meeting. 

 

Happily, Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz (Meiko) and especially Amber Gray (Carina) give focused, grounded performances that serve the comedy instead of themselves, keeping Eureka Day afloat.