“Eureka Day” is surely the quintessential “How Berkeley can you be?” play.
It received its world premiere at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company in 2018, and, as Josh Costello, its director back then and also now for its Marin Theatre local revival, points out, “It’s a play about Berkeley parents, written by a Berkeley parent [Jonathan Spector], a Berkeley parent directing it, a Berkeley parent designing the costumes [Maggie Whitaker]. It felt like the circle was complete between audience, director and characters,” he says. “So specific to Berkeley. I had no idea if it would play someplace else.”
It not only did—in London’s Old Vic in 2022, various other theaters stateside and in South Australia and Austria—it also won the 2025 Tony for Best Revival of a Play for its Manhattan Theatre Club production.
Now, the Mill Valley production opening in previews on Aug. 28 is being coproduced with Aurora with most of the original Berkeley designers and actors intact: Charisse Loriaux, Lisa Anne Porter and Teddy Spencer plus two replacements, Leontyne Mbele-Mbong and Howard Swain, all local.
Following a series of earnest, initially politely contentious meetings of a parents’ committee at a local private, conscientiously “woke” elementary school, “Eureka Day” satirizes a topic that soon became even hotter than at the time of the show’s premiere: vaccinations. At Eureka Day School, there’s been a mumps outbreak.
What begins as a civilized discussion among responsible, open-minded parents devolves rapidly and, in the second half, becomes quite serious.
It’s a play that will make you laugh as hard as you’ve ever laughed at a play; a livestream scene during a committee meeting famously evokes so much audience laughter, it’s hard to hear the dialogue. But it also will make you gasp. Spector has said that it’s ultimately about the failure of a utopia.
It now seems eerily prescient.
In his car on the way to drop off his 3-year-old at school in Oakland, author Spector discusses the multi-award-winning comedy’s new production. Since its premiere, Spector has had several other award-winning plays produced in the Bay Area, including “Best Available” at Shotgun Players in Berkeley in 2024.
Of the balance between comedy and drama “Eureka Day” navigates, Spector says, “The difference between [the two genres] is that the stakes are equally high, but the thing you’re fighting over feels disproportionate to the stakes—but it’s not that the stakes don’t feel real to [the characters].”
It’s very important to him that “Eureka Day’s” characters are not caricatures. “Having seen a whole bunch of productions, which is a privilege,” he says, “the ones less successful pushed the comedy into that over-the-top place. That makes it more difficult to get into the more serious stuff in the second half.”
Before the pandemic, when he first chose the topic, he discovered that even among friends with whom he shared values, some didn’t vax their kids. That fascinated him and was the initial impetus for the play.
“Vaccines [back then] were part of an issue that wouldn’t tell you anything about politics,” he muses. “Now it would.”
Despite the various productions along the way, Spector hadn’t done much rewriting until the recent Broadway show. The rewrites, he says, were mostly based on more fully realizing the intent of the play. “I cut a few lines because they were giving context for things like herd immunity,” he says, “which was necessary in 2018.” He agrees that in a certain sense it’s a period piece: “It wouldn’t make sense [to set it in the present] because of Trump and politics and vaccines.”
For his part, Marin Theatre Artistic Director Lance Gardner, who himself went to a private elementary school in Berkeley, says “Eureka Day” is the smartest look at Berkeley he’s seen. The collaboration with Aurora was initially proposed by Costello, and Gardner eagerly signed on. “I’m positive there are people who haven’t seen it and would love to,” he says, of his Marin County audience.
He adds, “I look for opportunities to send audiences away thinking — not with an answer—and Jonathan is one of the best writing now.”
“It’s great to get to do a play again,” says director Costello, chatting on the phone after a day of rehearsals. The actors, he observes, have a sort of muscle memory from seven years ago. “But it’s different this time… Everything is more heightened now, more relevant.”
On a practical, physical level, it’s quite different, too: Spector wrote the play for Aurora’s small venue and thrust stage. It was commissioned and developed there, initially under then-artistic director Tom Ross, and Costello was the company’s literary manager.
Aurora’s thrust is almost like playing in the round, as an actor’s back at any given moment might be facing the audience, whereas Marin’s proscenium allows a director to create a stage picture and stay with it for a longer period of time.
“You have to think about, what are the transitions and shifts within a conversation, and how to do you mark that?” Costello explains. “This is a different and fun challenge.”
He notes that Spector is a voracious reader: “It seems like everything goes into his plays. He’s wrestling with a lot of different ideas.
“And he has a great ear for dialogue. On the page there are sentences that start and don’t end, get interrupted. And people interrupt themselves. It’s very much how people actually talk.”
Says Spector, “For every writer, it’s intuitive how you hear the world. That’s a thing I don’t know how to teach. It’s just sort of instinctual, hard to talk about.” Of course, he adds, there are exercises to help that process, things like recording people talking and then transcribing it.
The second half of “Eureka Day” asks the audience to go on a much more profound journey than one might expect, Costello says.
The joy of restaging this play is bittersweet. The 24-year-old Aurora recently announced its closing, possibly permanently, due to financial hardship. The announcement follows on the heels of other beloved local theaters that have closed recently, such as California Shakespeare Theater and Cutting Ball. “It’s very weird to be here in Mill Valley working on ‘Eureka Day’ while back in Berkeley people are putting things in boxes,” Costello says ruefully.
Meanwhile, Spector is working on a new play “with hopefully a big life ahead” for Theater J in Washington D.C.; and his “This Much I Know” which premiered at Aurora in 2022, moves Off-Broadway in a Theatre J/59E59 production. He has a few other commissions in various stages of development.
Meanwhile, “Eureka Day” continues unabated. A dozen productions are currently slated around the country.
“Eureka Day” runs Aug. 28-Sept. 21 at Marin Theatre, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. Tickets are $44-$99 at marintheatre.org.
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