Review: TimeLine Theater Company's production of ‘Eureka Day’ is clever, crafty and profoundly funny

As Oscar Wilde informed us, life imitates art, sometimes more than the other way around.

As a striking example of that, we have the preternaturally prescient “Eureka Day,” a clever, crafty and profoundly funny comedy by playwright Jonathan Spector about vaccine policy, first produced in 2018 in Berkeley, California, which is when and where the work is set.

Receiving its Chicago premiere in a finely tuned production from TimeLine Theater Company, in partnership with Broadway in Chicago, the play follows the debate within the Executive Committee of a progressive elementary school (the titular “Eureka Day”) following an outbreak of mumps.

Filled with well-meaning individuals who — amusingly blatant passive aggression aside — respectfully debate whether “transracial adoptee” should be added as a racial identifier to the school’s application form for the sake of comprehensive inclusivity, the committee operates under idealistic rules, including a requirement for consensus decision-making.

But what happens, the play asks, when its members can’t agree about whether to mandate vaccinations in order to reopen the school after the outbreak? Can the school — which Spector clearly sees as a metaphor for society — survive?

Written pre-COVID but following California’s hardening of such mandates after a measles outbreak originated at Disneyland in 2014, the play diagnoses the rapid social decay that can occur when even like-minded people can’t agree on truths.

In a scene that’s as uproariously funny as it is disturbingly recognizable in the Zoom era, the committee, led by the school’s principal Don (PJ Powers), holds an online meeting for Eureka Day parents. It doesn’t take long for the online chats, projected onto a screen for the audience to read, to descend from concern, to disagreement, to shocking incivility. Let’s just say it would violate the standards of any newspaper’s comments section.

It’s the crowd-pleasing nature of this sequence — with its sharp dichotomy of meeting formality and utter chaos — as well as the play’s obvious, and continuing, topicality, that landed “Eureka Day” on Broadway last year in a production directed by Chicago’s Anna D. Shapiro. This staging, directed by Lili-Anne Brown, isn’t a touring version of that production but certainly meets that quality level.

Brown has cast this work to the hilt. Powers, TimeLine’s artistic director, walks gingerly on figurative eggshells, so eager for everyone to play well together, particularly since he has his job at stake.

Rebekah Ward convincingly combines complex contradictions as Suzanne, a long-serving member of the committee whose motherly pride in the school bleeds into a sense of ownership.

As the committee’s newcomer, Gabrielle Lott-Rogers delivers a deeply nuanced performance, making the character Carina keenly aware at all moments of how she is perceived, but also not above the occasional revealing side stare.

As characters who change over the course of the play, as opposed to simply being revealed, Jürgen Hooper wrestles with humility as the at-first overconfident tech-bro-turned-househusband, and Aurora Adachi-Winter achingly, and comically, externalizes her struggle to reconcile competing beliefs and values.

“Eureka Day” has a certain straightforwardness to its tightly drawn plot that belies its sophistication. It’s satirical — and billed as such — in poking fun at Bay Area liberals, and yet it also has a kindness and sensitivity in the way it approaches its characters, including its anti-vaxxers (who are also Bay Area liberals!). Yes, Spector clearly takes sides here in the debate over vaccines, but he makes sure that, in progressive parlance, everyone is “heard.”

Brown’s direction here excels in this regard. She tamps down the judgment of caricature and emphasizes human sympathy even while she prioritizes the exact timing necessary for the comedy.

The play ends with an irony that was almost certainly added after it was initially written, with everyone optimistically looking forward to the 2019-2020 school year. We know what comes after, how schools like Eureka Day will be turned even more inside out and how quarantines and vaccine mandates will drive even further fury, leading to a famed anti-vaxxer taking control of the government’s vaccine schedule itself.

This is a terrific production of a terrific play. It’s exactly what we need, perhaps, a vehicle for laughing at our own society’s predicament.

And yet we also know that the sequel has a different ending and belongs to a different genre, so very likely to be a tragedy.