Woke culture is all around us, especially among my generation, and there’s no denying that. There are times when it is absolutely necessary to listen to it, and there’s also times to simply just shut it out. And when you try to battle so many of these topics onstage while merely trying to highlight one specific wildly-debated topic, you begin to lose sight of the entire picture of what the heck this story’s all about. Jonathan Spector’s “Eureka Day” is a cacophony of wokeness whose central theme is the differing viewpoints on vaccination policies within the school system, but that theme appears to get lost within the protruding topics of class status, climate change, polyamory, social justice, and so much more that takes up more space than is needed.
For a comedy that tries to take a poke or two at wokeness, I found myself barely laughing. It felt like Spector wasn’t making a clever satire out of woke culture, but seemed to be making it read more like a less exciting TV school dramedy, only instead of the focus being on angsty liberal teens, it’s on semi-angsty liberal adult board members (maybe a little too liberal if you ask me) which you’d think would be sidesplitting but is nothing but melancholically deflating but somehow managed to find one or two moments of contemplation and vulnerability.
Even Anna D. Shapiro’s staging, while simple in its own right, is nothing spectacular to behold, and even in one, and I mean ONE, hysterical moment taking place in virtual meeting with an unfiltered comment section projected on the back wall, you begin to flounder in deciding on whether to pay more attention to the comments or to the board and their bickering. Couldn’t she have picked paced everything out in that scene without giving an audience neck strain, cross eyes, and double-split internal processing? Like I couldn’t even tell you what anyone onstage was saying because we were all laughing so hard at those comments, and that included a pretty pivotal plot point. Even a beautifully whimsical children’s school library set and a cast of five equally talented stage veterans is not enough to make the wokeness in the pot simmer. If anything, you’re basically watching the pot boil over and its contents spread into a million different puddles.
I guess walking into"Eureka Day," I was expecting to see a gut busting caricature of the way our world has become like we saw in Larissa Fasthorse's spot-on, undeservedly robbed "Thanksgiving Play" two seasons ago. What I got was 90 minutes of overwhelm in unnecessary topics, overstatement in said topics, understatement on the central topic, and underwhelm in the comedy department. If this is the direction theater is going in in terms of social change, by overwhelming the brain and senses with everything woke all at once, we're gonna be in for a slightly rude and tiresome awakening.
