THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Timely doesn't begin to describe this newish American play by Jonathan Spector, which has Oscar winner Helen Hunt making her West End debut. Producer Sonia Friedman discovered it off Broadway in 2018. Little did she know that Covid-19 was around the corner and would transform how audiences respond to this.
Spector combines deft satire with an ability to draw together the many strands of the anti-vaxx debate. Set in an achingly progressive Eureka Day junior school in an affluent California suburb, it explores how an outbreak of mumps among the kids strains their professed tolerance of 'difference' as the parents on a school board descend into ideological warfare and their utopia gets torn to shreds It's brilliant on what makes a community and more importantly how language has been debased in the fruitless obsession with phony inclusivity.
On Rob Howell's great school-room set we meet the School Board. There is Suzanne (Helen Hunt), the veteran of the group who has a nun-like devotion to a checklist of progressive ideas, and who has shaped the school's ethos. There's middle-aged Don (Mark McKinney), the Chair, who is barely able to utter a sentence without mentally checking his privilege and there's Susan Kelechi Watson (from TV's This Is Us, so no stranger to Californian sun-kissed angst) who is new and can't quite believe what she's landed herself in – she becomes the Judas.
There is Kirsten Foster as May, a young Asian mother who professes fealty to the cause but whose frantic passive aggressive knitting reveals she may not feel she is “being heard”. And then there's Eli (Ben Schnetzer), a handsome young Dad and the epitome of bourgeois bohemian who constantly excuses his 'cis-white-male'-ness while lounging cat like on the floor (probably loves his yoga). He's loaded, having been “one of the first Google employees” and it turns out quietly bankrolls the school. In a rare act of real passion, he's embroiled in a torrid affair with May.
When the outbreak hits, Suzanne's instinct is to undermine the Public Health letter they are required to convey, but soon both May's and Eli's kids are ill and things come to a head. It turns out that most of these privileged kids haven't been vaccinated, not uncommon in rich bohemian neighborhoods. To survive, the school must revise its liberal rules on jabs and instigate a policy. War breaks out.
Despite the tortuous debates, director Katy Rudd gives it momentum and deftly builds tension around ridiculously fraught moments involving 'inappropriate' language. It all culminates in a beautifully staged piece of farce when the board convenes a Zoom meeting for one of their 'Community Activated Conversations'. As they fret about how they might "frame this conversation" the chat function in the call (projected above them) ignites, as the neighbors whine, quibble, go off on tangents and virtue signal, so that within a few minutes it all disintegrates into an online brawl. All this time the Board prattle on and, cleverly, we can't really hear them as the audience is in hysterics.
Spector is great in illustrating how the group, while trying to set itself outside of the prevailing power structures (when they blatantly aren't), is bolstered by an obsession with language which obfuscates and cowers while pretending to clarify and liberate. Until the boil is lanced, everyone is exploding with frustration at their inability to say what they really feel. It is all performative and it makes for great theater.
The tone darkens in Act 2 as Eli's child lies critical in hospital and a petition is rapidly gaining ground to exclude the unvaccinated. Spector then lets Suzanne give us her tragic back story about losing her child to a bad vaccine reaction. This strikes as a bit disingenuous considering he spent Act 1 lampooning her, but Hunt is great in drawing out the humanity of a woman trying to get beyond her grief.
Amid all the talk of 'community' it never dawns on this group how nothing could better illustrate it than a public vaccination program itself. You acquiesce to a vaccine precisely because of a debt to your neighbors and it only works if a threshold is reached to attain herd immunity and the threat can be vanquished.
Wonder how Eureka Day got through Covid!
