“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
Bill Irwin and Jessica Hecht in Eureka Day.
When
Until Jan 19, 2025
Where
Etc
Photo: Jeremy Daniel