Bay Area play, local artists get Tony Award nominations
'Eureka Day,' about a mumps outbreak caused by undervaccination at an elite Berkeley private school, received a Tony Award nomination for best revival of a play. Written by Oakland playwright Jonathan Spector, it marks the first time in recent memory that a play about the Bay Area, written by a current Bay Area resident, has received a nod from the nation's highest honors for commercial theater, which are overseen by the American Theatre Wing and the Broadway League. 'Eureka Day' premiered at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre in 2018, under the direction of Josh Costello.
'I feel amazing. It's surreal,' Spector told the Chronicle just after 6 a.m. Thursday, May 1, when the nominations were announced by actors Sarah Paulson and Wendell Pierce on the Tony Awards' YouTube Channel.
'I never could have imagined when this play started its life seven years ago at Aurora that this little Berkeley play made with Berkeley people would one day be on Broadway and have a Tony nomination,' Spector continued. 'It was not on my bingo card.'
Spector isn't the only artist with Bay Area ties among this year's nominees. San Francisco-born Darren Criss and Hayward native James Monroe Iglehart both received nods for the best performance by a leading actor in a musical award. Criss got recognized for 'Maybe Happy Ending,' in which he plays a robot seeking connection, while Iglehart was nominated for 'A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical,' in which he played the title role. San Francisco's own Francis Jue also took home an acting nod, for best performance by an actor in a featured role in a play, for his work in 'Yellow Face.'
Additionally, 'Dead Outlaw,' with a book by Berkeley native Itamar Moses, got seven nominations, including best musical, best book of a musical and best original score. (Moses has won previously, for 'The Band's Visit.')
'Eureka Day' begins with an executive committee meeting among parents and a headmaster, with dialogue that nails the Bay Area's particular breed of progressive affluence: a stay-at-home dad in an open marriage and a babysitter he met at Burning Man; the mom who, embarrassed of her privilege, calls her kid's private school 'more of a community school.' There's lots of concern about 'holding space' and 'feeling seen' — all as the group debates something as trifling as adding an option to a drop-down menu on the school's admission application.
But soon the mumps outbreak splinters people accustomed to agreeing politically and governing by consensus. It all detonates in an uproarious scene in which the executive committee tries to livestream a meeting about the surge of the viral infection to all the school's parents, only to get outtalked and overrun by increasingly beastly commenters (whose individual posts ping in real time, displayed via projection).
For all its comedy, the show also achieves the trickiest of balances: It doesn't render vaccine skeptics as cardboard cut-outs, but it doesn't validate their points of view either. Rather, it reveals how on certain polarized issues, political common ground, and the idea we can somehow eke it out through productive debate, are mirages.
The show's Tony nod comes as outbreaks of measles — declared eradicated in the U.S. in 2000 — have popped up in Texas, Indiana, Kansas, New Mexico, Ohio and Oklahoma this year, all while Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to disseminate mixed messages about vaccines, drawing ire from health officials for an uncoordinated response.
In the livestream scene of 'Eureka Day,' Spector said, 'There's a comment that I was really on the fence about cutting, because I felt like it was too extreme, where somebody says, 'These vaccines are all made from the cells of dead fetuses.' And then RFK Jr. said that yesterday about the measles vaccine in a press conference.'
He added, 'It's maybe the monkey's paw of playwright gifts to have an eye towards things — but only bad things coming true.'
The Tony nod isn't the only time 'Eureka Day' has been part of national news this year. In February, the show was part of the spate of cancellations at the Kennedy Center following Trump's self-appointment as chair of the flagship Washington, D.C., performing arts organization.
'I … struggled with whether having work there in these circumstances would be an act of resistance or an act of complicity. There's compelling arguments both ways,' Spector told the Chronicle in March.
As time has passed, he added on the morning of the Tony nomination, his feelings have shifted more and more to relief.
In any event, the show has a slew of other productions currently running or planned across the country — Boston, Denver, Houston, Pittsburgh and Sacramento — and the globe, including in Nottingham, England; Sydney and Vienna.
Past Tony Award winners with connections to the Bay Area include Menlo Park native Will Brill (for 'Stereophonic,' which tours to BroadwaySF's Curran Theatre in the fall); San Francisco native Lena Hall (for 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch'); and Pickle Family Circus co-founder Bill Irwin (for 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'); Irwin also starred in 'Eureka Day' on Broadway, alongside Jessica Hecht, whose performance earned her a Tony nomination for best performance by an actress in a featured role in a play.
Spector's other notable local world premieres include 'This Much I Know' at Aurora Theatre and 'Best Available' at Shotgun Players. His 'Birthright,' about American Jews on a Birthright trip to Israel, premiered in April at Miami New Drama in Florida.
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