“Though its early scenes may lead you to think that you’ve entered a satirical shooting gallery filled with easy targets,” the New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote in 2019, “it winds up engaging you on a much deeper, more compassionate level.” Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day, a drama from 2018, is set in a progressive private school in Berkeley, California, where it dives into the anxieties of 21st-century parenting. When a mumps outbreak disrupts this P.C. community, liberal parents are forced to reconsider the school’s flexible vaccine policy. As more children get sick, the board faces its biggest nightmare: deciding for everyone. “In the squabbling and eventual all-out feuding that ensues,” Brantley adds, “characters who had seemed so easy to ridicule as stereotypes acquire a substance and specificity that inhibit both derision and facile categorization.” Anna D. Shapiro directs. —Jeanne Malle
The Arts Intel Report
Eureka Day
When
Until Jan 19, 2025