Reginald Theatre, May 31
7/10
Eureka Day is a satire to make you squirm more than laugh. Exaggeration is almost non-existent, the corollary being that naturalism is ratcheted up to the point where it can seem like spying on real people more than watching a play.
Playwright Jonathan Spector takes his title from the private Californian primary school where the play’s set. A board of four parents and the principal decide matters of school policy – strictly by consensus rather than voting. Anything else would set a bad example for the children – who are so perfect as to cheer when the other side scores a goal in soccer.
The system has apparently worked like one big love-in, until a case of mumps is diagnosed. Now the saccharine consensus rapidly sours. The board, you see, contains a couple of anti-vaxxers in May (Deborah An) and especially in the pushy school co-founder, Suzanne (Katrina Retallick). It also has two who trust the medical science: wealthy philanthropist Eli (Christian Charisiou) and especially newcomer Carina (Branden Christine). Don, the principal (Jamie Oxenbould), inclines towards the science, but inclines even more to conflict avoidance and fence-sitting.
With battle lines drawn, Spector gives us his centrepiece and crowning glory: a virtual town hall meeting for parents and board, dubbed a “community activated conversation”. Occupying a quarter of the play, the scene flicks the satire from squirmy to laugh-out-loud, as the parents’ ever more vitriolic on-line comments are projected for us to read, while the poisoned interaction between the on-stage characters continues, almost as a soundtrack to what we’re reading.
Masterfully constructed, the scene manages to build in its hilarity, after which Spector dumps us back into harsher realities: Eli’s son’s mumps threaten his life, and it was losing a child post-vaccine that made Suzanne an anti-vaxxer.
Just as you read Shakespeare’s plays not knowing whether he was a committed Protestant or a closet Catholic, you reach this point still wondering where Spector stands in the vaccination debate – which is infinitely preferable to the play being baldly didactic.
Craig Baldwin directs this Outhouse Theatre Co production with typical detail (other than the voices being too soft) and careful casting. Spector, who also flirts with racism (as well as climate denialism, social media behaviour, political correctness and public-versus-private education) specifies the racial makeup of his characters. Don and Suzanne are white and older; Carina, 40s and black; Eli, younger and Jewish; May (originally Meiko), younger and Asian.
Christine and Retallick’s performances are especially nuanced in the increasing barbed exchanges between Carina and Suzanne, while Oxenbould finds a physicality for Don that amusingly dovetails with his fence-sitting proclivities.
But there’s also something missing, not so much with the production, as with the play. Amid the discomfort of watching five people who mean well behaving somewhere between foolishly and abominably, we remain oddly detached because the author seems to have little affection for those whom he’s satirising.
Until June 21.