Review: In ‘Eureka Day,’ Holding Space for Those You Hate

A hilarious new Broadway production asks: Can the superwoke vaxxers and anti-vaxxers at an elite private school learn to get along?

Just in time, laughter is making a big comeback on Broadway. Better yet, it comes in several varieties.

For catty yowling, check out Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard, wringing necks in “Death Becomes Her.” For helpless giggles, there’s Cole Escola as that cabaret legend Mary Todd Lincoln in “Oh, Mary!” And if you enjoy the hysteria of family fireworks, “Cult of Love” should leave you gasping.

But the funniest character now on Broadway isn’t even a human being — or not exactly. Getting the biggest belly laughs in Jonathan Spector’s “Eureka Day,” which opened on Monday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, is a yellow thumbs-up emoji.

The emoji appears — chipper then aggravating then weirdly insidious — in a livestream meeting of parents and executive board members at Eureka Day, an upscale private school in Berkeley, Calif. As Don, the principal, tries to handle a looming crisis, using every banality at his new-age disposal, the conversation in the chat veers correspondingly out of control. His attempt to “unpack” issues calmly has instead disgorged a torrent of personal attacks, vulgar language and childish invective. By the end of the scene, the third of the play’s quick seven, the thumb seems like a different finger entirely.

Spector’s hilarious poison-pen satire of educational wokeism has led us to that point with great care. A Manhattan Theater Club production, directed bracingly by Anna D. Shapiro, it begins, in 2018, with a kind of dramaturgical canapé to whet our appetites for the main dish. As the lights come up on the school’s bright library, prominently featuring a social justice collection, Don (Bill Irwin) is leading the board in a discussion about a proposed addition to the drop-down menu on the prospective parent application. Should it include “transracial adoptee” as an option among the many other ethnic identities offered?

The point is argued with elaborate courtesy bordering on incomprehensibility. Meiko (Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz) says “the term itself is not offensive,” but Suzanne (Jessica Hecht) thinks it might be offensive “when you contextualize it in that way.” Eli (Thomas Middleditch) feels that failing to add the term would amount to a kind of erasure, given that “our Core Operating Principle here is that everyone should Feel Seen by this community.”