A PRIVILEGED PTA CIRCUS,
THEN A VAXNADO

The funniest ten minutes onstage, ever,
flanked by a modestly amusing satire.

In Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day, five concerned parents gather around a table in the library of what is very obviously a wealthy and well-equipped children’s school. They form the executive board and are there to discuss the addition of a new category—transracial adoptee—to a drop-down menu that is part of the application process. This is a matter of grave importance because per Eli—millionaire tech-bro-turned-primary-caregiver—this is a school “whose Core Operating Principle is, ‘Everyone should Feel Seen by this Community.’”

Counterpoint, from Suzanne—thin, entitled, passive-aggressive, bossy, and as such immediately identified as the villain of the group less than two minutes into the play—“There’s no benefit in Feeling Seen if you’re simultaneously Being Othered.”

That exchange sums up the tone of the first third of Eureka Day, a witty satire of affluent liberal parenting. These people care. They care so much that they’re almost completely ineffectual. The transracial adoptee discussion comes to nothing because every decision MUST be made by consensus.

Eureka Day school committee members Eli (Jürgen Hooper),
Carina (Gabrielle Lott-Rogers), Suzanne (Rebekah Ward),
Don (PJ Powers), and Meiko (Aurora Adachi-Winter)

And that’s a problem for the play. Is there an easier target for satire than the more-liberal-than-thou set? Once the personalities have been established, the proceedings are fairly predictable. In fact, they’re very predictable. You could play bingo. Here’s a white-cis-het joke, there’s an open marriage joke (“I thought you guys had Passed Through Monogamy?”). Burning Man makes an appearance. You get the idea. As cleverly written and delivered as these jokes are, there’s no hiding the fact that they’re all variations on a theme and about fifteen minutes in, I started to worry about how long this could be kept up.

Fortunately for us, Spector was clearly worried as well.

Suzanne (Rebekah Ward), Don (PJ Powers),
Meiko (Aurora Adachi-Winter), Carina (Gabrielle Lott-Rogers)

Unfortunately for us, he swerves off in the worst possible direction: when one of the children in the school develops mumps, Eureka Day pivots from a broad satire of liberal kookiness to a vax/anti-vax debate. Of all the issues that are subjected to a “both sides” debate, vaccination is likely the worst one to focus on for the simple fact that objectively, there really aren’t two sides. Pitting Suzanne against Carina (Gabrielle Lott-Rogers, doing excellent work in an underwritten part), Spector writes himself into a corner. Having painted Suzanne as a controlling, self-centered scold for most of the play, he uses one of the most manipulative tropes in the book to garner sympathy for her character. None of this is a knock on Rebekah Ward (Suzanne), who is fantastic, and her delivery of the monologue in question is brilliant.

(front) Eli (Jürgen Hooper), Carina (Gabrielle Lott-Rogers), Don (PJ Powers),
Suzanne (Rebekah Ward), and (back) Meiko (Aurora Adachi-Winter)

But even after that monologue, they’re still stuck in that corner. How do you make a decision by consensus when the two sides are fundamentally incompatible with each other?

That, dear folk, is why the Greeks invented the deus ex machina. Figuratively deployed here, it’s about as much of a wimp-out as I’ve ever seen on stage.

But there are many joys to be had here. The actors are uniformly excellent even in the weaker parts; I wish Jürgen Hooper (Eli) and Aurora Adachi-Winter (Meiko) had more to work with, because they’re wonderful. It’s the delightful asides that charm the most: Don’s omnipresent SodaStream bottle; the resentment with which Suzanne works her stainless steel (natch!) straw; Meiko’s (almost) psychotically intense knitting. These actors have fleshed out their characters beautifully, with PJ Powers (Don) as the MVP. His Pollyanna of a school principal is note-perfect. He gets more laughs from his eager-to-placate stammer than I would have thought possible and his scream of “stop typing” at the end of the best scene in the play (see below) gets my vote for the funniest delivery on stage that night.

And I haven’t even mentioned the centerpiece: an executive board meeting during the enforced quarantine, with the parents participating via a chat box seen on a screen that descends behind the actors. Without giving anything away, I can say, without exaggeration, that it is one of the funniest scenes I have seen on stage. Ever.

It’s so funny that even if the rest of the play were awful—which it’s not; it is consistently amusing—it would still be recommended.

It’s so funny that I wondered if the scene had been conceived/written first and the rest of the play written to fit it.

It’s so funny that I want that damn chat box thumbs-up emoji to win a Jeff award.

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photos by Brett Beiner Photography

Eureka Day
Broadway In Chicago and TimeLine Theatre
Broadway Playhouse, 175 E. Chestnut St., Chicago
ends on February 22, 2026
for tickets, visit Broadway in Chicago

for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago

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