‘Eureka Day' playwright Jonathan Spector talks vaccine debates, vicious comment sections, and ‘the failure of a utopia'

Yahoo

6 days ago

Playwright Jonathan Spector describes his arrival on Broadway as a "wild" and "out of body" experience. Not only did he make his mainstream debut with Eureka Day, a comedy about vaccine mandates at an elementary school, he also became a Tony nominee.
Speaking to Gold Derby, Spector describes the creation of that infamous Zoom live-stream scene, and why he believes that the play is actually about "the failure of a utopia."
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Gold Derby: was first produced in 2018. So much has happened in the world since then, especially as it relates to the core topic of this play, including a worldwide pandemic. How do you think the play lands now versus that 2018 production?
Jonathan Spector: We were in rehearsal during the election and I guess I, probably naively, thought it was going to go the other way. So I had one idea about what I thought the play was going to mean in that context of opening with incoming President Kamala Harris. And then I have a different idea about how it landed now. It almost feels more like a document of how we got here, of the way in which caretaking and thoughtfulness and all of these tools of liberalism are just not quite up to meeting certain kinds of challenges, as evidenced by our failure to prevent [Donald] Trump from being reelected. Now [vaccines] are an issue that people have a much stronger personal connection to. Before the pandemic, people could engage with the metaphor of the play more easily as a sort of metaphor for democracy, or how you create a society with people when you can't agree on what's true. And then, coming out of the pandemic, it was hard for anybody to see anything but COVID in the play. And I think now it's a little more of a balance. The live-stream scene, although it's changed very little from what it was before, is very different for the audience because now everybody in the audience has lived through that experience many times. There's a much more visceral response to it.
Did you ever want to alter the script in any way considering those changes in the world?
There were a couple of very minor changes I made of just taking out a line here or there. Before COVID, I had to explain things a little more but now everybody knows what herd immunity is, so we don't need a character to explain that. Obviously the last line of the play is new, of looking forward to the 2019-2020 school year. Beyond that, all the changes I made were less about the pandemic and more about continuing to work on the play and just make it the best version of itself.
That live-stream moment you mentioned gets the entire audience laughing with such recognition as we see these vicious comments projected on screen. What was the impetus behind that scene?
When I was researching the play, I spent a lot of time on internet message boards where people would fight about vaccines and they would get so vicious with each other. So much of how we live now, how we engage with an issue, is online. So there was something that would be missing if I wrote a play about [vaccines], but left out that big part of how we engage with this. I also didn't want to make my characters be as nasty as people get online. The other part was just a desire to bring more of the school community into the play and not have it just be these five people who are representing everybody. The first production in Berkeley, that theater has a very old subscriber base. I think when they had done plays in the past with text projection, they found that people didn't really pay a lot of attention to it. So our expectation was that maybe most people wouldn't pay attention to it. But the first time we had an audience, you couldn't hear a word on stage because people were laughing so much. So I used to have continuous comments all the way through the scene. Then after realizing how people react, I then went through and I had to sculpt it much more to make sure that the things that are important to hear come in the clear, so the focus can shift back to the actors and then go back to the comments.
The five main characters all have these very different views, and yet they are all firmly committed to creating this ideal world for the kids and families. Why was that sense of empathy important to include within the main characters?
I think it's much more interesting if you're going to have any play with any kind of political valence or issue, that it's hard for people to be dismissive of each other. Prior to COVID, vaccines and vaccine skepticism was not particularly politicized. Knowing someone didn't vaccinate their kids didn't actually tell you if they were Democrat or Republican in the way that it now is very correlated, but back then it was maybe the only contentious issue that was not correlated with your politics. People on the right and left were both skeptical of vaccines for different reasons. So that then allowed it to be about people who all basically had the same worldview and the same values and wanted the same things, and it was just this one thing that they lived in different realities about. To me, the play is really about the failure of a utopia. They had this thing that worked really well for a really long time, until it finally came up against something that it couldn't overcome.
The skepticism side of the argument is highlighted quite beautifully in Jessica Hecht's monologue. Her character Suzanne reveals a heartbreaking loss of a child, which led her down the path of vaccine denialism. What went into creating that moment?
When I was writing that, my daughter was less than 1. That first year, you're so paranoid, you're always going in and checking if they're breathing constantly. So, when I listen to that monologue now, I think that's a very visceral fear. It's so distant from my life now, but at the time you could really touch it. And then I feel like it's always the most interesting, sometimes the most fun, to be writing from the point of view of the character who you disagree with, and trying to find the most truthful and empathetic way that they got there. The other thing that informed that monologue is I watched this documentary created by Andrew Wakefield, who's the discredited doctor who put forward the link between autism and vaccines and lost his medical license in the U.K. He is kind of a charlatan, but he put out this documentary about vaccines, and they have these parents whose kids have really severe developmental disabilities that they believe are caused by vaccines. And the thing is, even though that guy is clearly just a fraud, when you see these parents, even if I think they're wrong about the reason their kids are like this, the pain they're feeling about their kids is very real. I wanted to somehow hold onto it as well. Just because you might not be right about what's happening doesn't mean that there's not real suffering there.
After the show ended, I heard a lot of audience members remarking that they unexpectedly felt for Suzanne. Have you heard positive reactions from audience members on both sides of this issue?
I wanted to be really careful about feeling like you're being fair and truthful about where people are coming from, but not just ethically. If I felt like if somebody walks out of the play and feels like, oh no, maybe I shouldn't vaccinate my kids now, that would be like I was doing some real harm. I don't think that's where the play comes down. And all the research is that it's actually extremely difficult to change someone's mind about vaccines, and so it's not going to happen with a play. I mostly found that people have responded pretty positively. I guess a handful of pretty committed people that I've talked to who have seen the play, felt like their point of view was represented fairly. Somebody said they feel like everybody's ganging up on them all the time, and that's what was shown in the play. And so I was like, okay, well, I'm glad that they felt that. But, it's a tricky line to walk. That's what's so great about having these wonderful actors like Jess and Amber [Gray], who can hold such nuance in their performances.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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