“Eureka Day” is a comic delight at Pasadena Playhouse; Goodbye

Is “Eureka Day”, is a winning comedy from Tony now on the boards of the Pasadena Playhouse, also up to the height that the script really feels torn from today’s titles? Or does he laugh despite this pressing topic? After all, few people are currently laughing at battles on vaccinations on children, which is the subject of the seriocomic arguments that burst among a group of parents in the script by Jonathan Spector. But the fact that the play is now presented as a period play, which takes place in the late 2010s, during its first production, just puts us enough to remove from current madness to drop our guards and laugh. If the climate has not yet immune to this kind of thing.

The main setting is a classroom in a progressive private school in Berkeley, which takes place almost entirely in a series of meetings of the board of directors where disagreements on how to manage an epidemic exhibit deep rockets and ultimately quite angry among the parents, on and off the edge. The first thing to know is that, as opposed to the way in which we could receive reports on the vaccine wars at the moment, it is not one thing to the right. All the parents of the Eureka Day school are liberals in good standing, just like a reference base, and the room recalls that virulent anti-Vaxxers have also been found on the left, even if we do not hear much of these voices at the moment. We certainly hear a lot of them in “Eureka Day”, and the comedy comes from the speed with which a community on the left and loving peace can turn into a circular shooting team, given the right trigger.

Strong performances are also distributed among the five actors on stage. (Technically, there are six, but revealing the nature of the additional camée would involve a minor spoiler.) The man is ostensibly in charge of the board of directors is a somewhat passive aggressive comrade named Don, played by Rick Harmon, who looks a bit like Bill Lumbergh of “Office Space”, if he had something close to a good heart. Donation wants to ensure that everyone is also treated, to almost painful extremes, but is inevitably the guy most likely to walk on other opinions. Anyone who has already participated in a business meeting in the midst of controversy can recognize it as the type of leader who responds to something that could be an existential threat by removing a marking pen and inviting suggestions for a list of “steps of action”. It is only bad insofar as its platitudes are one time.

The three female characters are all of a more cut state of mind, or at least they end up being there, although it is at different times in the procedure they each come to impatience, and for very different reasons. The clearest Brandon in the group is Suzanne (Mia Barron), whose condescending politeness will finally give way to rage once his opinions are disputed. Carina (Cherise Boothe), a new black lesbian arrival at school and the board of directors – and the substitute for the public to find themselves caught up how things work there – is the most anchored character, with the desire to take a step back and leave the more experienced players who will be questioned when things start in the spiral. It may not be an accident that Meiko (Camille Chen) “Meek” built directly in his name, which preiets that his possible pressure eruption can be the most explosive of all. What we know the best of her at the beginning is that she has an affair with the second male character, Eli (Nate Corddry), although he may not count as illegal as this guru of ultra-agreable technology is authorized to experiment, in her open marriage to an invisible partner … perhaps.

In the first scene, all quarrels of this fairly harmonious group occurs on elements of the agenda without consequences to add identities as “transracial adopted” specific to a list of self-descriptors in the school traction list. This is an example of how the spoofery can be obvious in “Eureka Day” – the self -spoofery, anyway, because in its widest blows, the show East A satire of liberalism, but an intrinsically affectionate breath. The conservatives could come to the show and take a kick from the coasts that have distributed themselves to the most delicate wing of progressivism, although at some point, they would be written as an intra-family fight to have Libs.

The idea that the intestine struggles are in the family are put to the test when the epidemic of aforementioned francs occurs, and the school must be closed, the debate occurring to find out if a vaccine mandate will be put in place before the reopening of the classrooms. This leads to a scene of “town hall” in the middle of the game in which the board of directors sets up an online forum for all the parents of the school to weigh with their opinions, which turns out to be a horrible unpredictable idea only for anyone who has never seen an open war burst in an internet forum before.

There is a scene that takes place as something really unique in comic theater. At least, I can say that I never remember laughing as hard within the limits of an 800 -seat space as what is happening with a full house at Pasadena Playhouse during this sequence. The funny part, if you want, is that it is not due to what the actors do on stage. Not at all slightly, but they mainly play heterosexual men and women on the aerial screen, where we see a scrolling of messages increasingly hostile than parents who attend the virtual meeting send the board of directors and each other. At times, laughter becomes so strong that you cannot even hear what the casting says on stage, and you hope it is without consequence so that you do not need, because the yuks come from the parents out of stage which, one at a time, become completely nuclear in the cat. Finally, the board will have the common sense to simply close your host laptop, but not before a mechanical of about 10 minutes in which no one is absolutely back from the keyboard.

“Eureka Day” will never go beyond this prolonged intermediate sequence for hilarity, and therefore fortunately, he does not try. But an inevitable drop in the final scenes in something poignant does not let the comedy go completely away. The characters come to the stadium and out of the stadium during these power failures, and the one who puts the greatest resistance to a vaccine mandate gives a convincing monologue explaining why she found herself there – in which you can feel the dramatist Spector doing her own humanist duty by reminding the public that even the adversaries of what we will consider for reason. their Reasons, as often as not.

But the game is stacked, so if you are an anti-Vaxxer, do not come to “Eureka Day” by imagining that the cards will be distributed also. If anything, Spector breaks him a little more against the anti-immunization force of the room he needs, which also seems to make her a relaxed, although accidental, racist strike, one more strike against her than what is really necessary. Just as it becomes too clear what we are going to end up thinking about Suzanne, it is not clear enough what we have to do with Eli, the technology magnate which somehow serves a goal of machine deus ex at the end, or its romantic partner, Meiko. It is nothing less than the pleasure of seeing the drop in Chen to listen to it finally, but once it has gone mad, really crazy, it withdraws in the margins of the final scenes, making you wish that it deserves a real culminating point, or at least an anticlimax, of itself.

These baffles aside, it is difficult to overestimate the right time that you will settle with this splendid casting, under the magnificently rhythmic direction of Teddy Bergman. Spector’s dialogue is so clear that you can find yourself taking an immediate note to see everything and everything that will never appear on the theater calendar. He wrote the kind of game where, when the last scene of the action (without intermission) turns out to be much shorter than those that preceded it, you can let a sigh of disappointment escape, that the whole affair is not going a little longer. (You will certainly be left by wondering how the original version of the play which took place in the late 2010s ended; this version has a perfect punchline which could not be written pre-Pandemic, and that is all that we will give on this subject.)

Above all, if you are at least halfway towards the gradual end of the spectrum, “Eureka Day” is remarkable for how much he considers his characters at least as apparently decent souls, all that is during their mistakes, their self-delicacate and their eagerness at certain lines at any cost. Spend time with a set of Sharp Valtans who bicker and decompose but ultimately signifyAt a certain level, counts as a kind of balm in an environment where we could believe in our fellow citizens and maybe many of them do not do so. With the combination of nasty jokes and the ultimate good will that the “Eureka day” has to offer, you would be well proven to take it.

“Eureka Day” takes place at the Pasadena Playhouse until October 5. Ticket information can be found here.