Eureka Day – When Vaxing becomes Vexing

Desiree Mee Jung, Max Pavel,John Shepard, Julina McClarin and Daina Michelle Griffith Credit: all to  Kristi Jan Hoover. 

          You’d think that somewhere in liberal Berkeley, California, you’d probably be likely to find a progressing private school for preteens. Playwright Jonathan Spector sketches out a reasonable day school model in his witty satire “Eureka Day,” now getting a staging at City Theatre.

          The play opens when the school’s executive board is shown meeting in the school library, a cleverly constructed and colorful kindergarten-ish set by Sasha Jin Schwartz. It’s the beginning of the school year, and the board is struggling with how to add the category “transracial adoptee” to its list of ethnic categories on the application for admission to the school.

          Operating under a Woke sensibility, the board’s modus operandi is to make decisions based on consensus. When we see the obstacles to coming to a decision on a simple thing like choosing the correct ethnic category on an application form, we come to suspect that far greater difficulties lie ahead when the issue becomes much more complex and intricate.

Heading the five-member board is John Shepard, whose task is similar to that of Phyton, the son of Helios, the Greek sun-god, charged with keeping the fiery steeds pulling his chariot in check. Cool headed and mild tempered, he rarely loses his composure when the members of the board get into heated discussions.

          In my mind, the play is divided into three sections, the first giving us a glimpse into the personalities and backgrounds of the five board members.

The second leads to one of the funniest moments ever witnessed in a drama where the playwright ingeniously uses a simulated Zoom meeting of the board and parent community to discuss the outbreak of mumps in the school and the method to handle it best. The audience gets to read comments of the live stream written on a screen in back of the actors and most of the comments are hilarious.

Here, Spector is at his wittiest, so much so the audience’s constant laughter drowned out the dialogue of the board members, but I didn’t care because I thoroughly enjoyed reading the scripted comments. They provided some of the most laugh-induced moments I ever encountered I live theater.

Part three, which comes after intermission, takes a much more serious turn. It revolves around the issue of collective responsibility versus individual choice. Should the school abandon its policy of not requiring child vaccination in light of the mumps epidemic engulfing the school and introduce a policy of required vaccination?

Desiree Mee Jung, Juliana McClarin, Daina Michelle Griffith and Max Pavel as Eli

Heading the anti-vax cause is Suzanne (Daina Michelle Griffith), the most dominant board member who has a personal reason for her opinion. Griffith pulls off a range of emotions, all the while trying to maintain an accepting, open-minded façade, one that’s ostensibly willing to entertain the thoughts of the other board members but unable to contain the emotion evoked by her unyielding views.

Suzanne’s strongest antagonist, Carina (Julina McClarin) is the newest member of the board, filling the roster practice of having a novice pulled from the parental pool for a one-year term. Even though she holds the position of board newcomer and initially is shown feeling her way, she begins to insert herself forcefully into the discussion.

Belying his powerful position as a well-heeled tech entrepreneur, Max Pavel is delightful in his youthful portrayal of Eli, a married man in a sexual liaison with Meiko (Desiree Mee Jung) while his wife is away in Pittsburgh (I‘d like to know if our town was actually cited in the original script or not). Many of Pavel’s mannerisms reminded me of early Keanu Reeves, and, while not a close match, they are just as beguiling.

Desiree Mee Jung as Meiko and Max Pavel as Eli

Ultimately, as one of the school’s major donors, his point of view carries a lot of weight with the other members, but did I wonder why the underdeveloped romantic aspect was included in the play as it seemed a bit extraneous.

Adil Mansoor’s direction brings out the individual idiosyncrasies of each of the actors and makes great use of the expansive set enlarged by a raised walkway in back of the sunken children’s library set.

In the end, celebrating inclusion is which all voices are heard is shown to be an incompatible with the goal of consensus. If nothing else, this smartly crafted, social satire is praiseworthy for the ingenious laughathon of the Zoom meeting and the touch-many-bases account of the ins and outs of vaccination. It’s a topical subject, wouldn’t you say?

One word of advice. Keep alert for the short but brilliant zinger at the end of the play. It’s well worth the wait and comes as the cherry on top the sundae.

Eureka Day is at City Theatre, 1300 Bingham St. on Pittsburgh’s South Side. Through March 29. For tickets, phone 412-431-4289 or www.citytheatrecompany.org.