Jonathan Spector’s play Eureka Day follows several contentious parents’ meetings about vaccine policies at a Berkeley private school. Originally staged in 2018, the play is currently running on Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club. He spoke before rehearsals began—and before the 2024 presidential election—with the play’s director, Anna D. Shapiro, as she recovered from Covid.
ANNA D. SHAPIRO: It’s hysterical to me that I’m talking to you from my Covid sick bed. It made me think about this play, and how long you’ve been living with it and where it started, in terms of what questions you were asking with it, and where you find yourself as it’s about to go to Broadway. Have the questions shifted? Has your focus shifted?
JONATHAN SPECTOR: In a weird way, it’s both the same and different. When I began working on it, I was really just trying to write a very Berkeley play about a very specific place and a very specific group of people. The reason vaccine skepticism seemed like an interesting thing to explore was because, at that time, it was the one issue where you could have people who basically all agree about everything except for this one thing. In doing research, I had spent a lot of time in the dark recesses of weird message boards and grappling the strange beliefs people had. This was also in the lead up to the 2016 election, so it was also a scary moment of realizing how the whole country was living in these two very separate realities. So that was informing it. But it still felt very particular to the place, and also to an issue that, unless you happen to have school-age kids or a new baby, you probably didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about. It felt very private—like, this is a play for Berkeley, about Berkeley, made by people in Berkeley, on an issue I had become obsessive about but most people don’t really care about that much.
To have it sort of explode out to be, like, an issue the entire world is obsessed with was very strange. Although there’s also a way in which this may be a perfectly goldilocks moment to be doing it. In the pre-Covid period, it had three or four productions, and people at that time were more able to see the vaccine debate as sort of a metaphor for democracy and society. Two years later, when theatre was just coming back, it seemed like all anybody could see was it being somehow a play about Covid. But now we’re in this very weird place where we’re “over” Covid—but obviously not, since you have it—and we’re trying to navigate this strange space of making choices, individually and collectively, about balancing the needs of society to get back to life and the need to allow people who are immunocompromised to exist in society. We’re in this place of nobody really being sure anymore what the answers are to those questions, and everybody kind of navigating it differently, and people still feeling very intensely on one end of the spectrum or the other about what everyone should be doing. I think that makes it an interesting time to do the play.
At the same time, the experience of watching the play with an audience is very similar to the experience of watching it with an audience pre-Covid. The audience is responding to the same moments in the play in largely the same way. Which makes sense, because people react to specific things humans do onstage and not to their shifting feelings about abstract ideas on viruses and public health.
In reading and rereading the play, it’s reminding me how linked now our identity is to our belief, and the crisis that exists now around who we are being linked to what we believe. Where is nuance allowed? How do we stay away from dogmatism? The people in this play are struggling toward something beautiful—for a place where everybody’s okay. Yet the question that keeps getting begged is, who gets to decide what everybody being okay is? What does everybody being okay mean? I think about that a lot now. I’ve encountered so many people throughout Covid where I thought I shared every political position with them in the world, until it came to vaccinations, and then I found out they didn’t believe in them. Not only did they not believe in them, they actively didn’t believe in them. So what do you do when there are these outliers who just blow everything up? I feel like that’s what the play wrestles with a lot.
Yeah, and with how these past eight years have changed us—the acceleration of how media and technology work, and how the algorithms create a reinforcing mechanism that makes us believe that almost everybody thinks exactly like we do about everything. This makes it much more jarring than it used to be to encounter somebody who doesn’t think like you do. It’s hard to remember, but I feel like 15 years ago, you would talk to somebody at an airport bar and you did not assume you were gonna have the same view about anything and that was fine, whereas now I think we have become very apprehensive about people who don’t believe the things that we believe. There’s the concern of where this whole chain of belief is going to lead; if you believe that the health risks of vaccines are being hidden as part of an enormous conspiracy, what else could you potentially believe? If you’re in a conspiracy theory frame of mind, then you’re supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for president, and then suddenly you’re supporting Trump because he’s endorsed him. It’s a very easy slippery slope to fall down. But of course, everybody feels that way about everybody else.
