Eureka Day
Gate Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
When privileged people lack genuine problems they’ll invent some to tear each other apart. That’s the thought underlying Eureka Day, Jonathan Spector’s satire of liberal confusion, which is making its Irish debut at the Gate Theatre.
The action opens during a board meeting at a progressive private school in Berkeley, California (where the play was originally staged, in 2018). At issue is a drop-down menu on the website where the parents of prospective students must declare their ethnic identity.
Rowan Finken’s Eli, a tech bro turned “full-time father”, is keen to add a new option: “transracial adoptee”. After much gauzy back and forth, the proposal is withdrawn. But there is no vote because, as Philippa Dunne’s Suzanne explains: “We only take decisions by consensus.”
Here, then, is the equivalent of Chekhov’s gun for the era of diversity and inclusion.
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Sure enough, all semblance of consensus will soon combust as the board confronts a mumps outbreak. It transpires that many students are unvaccinated, which becomes the subject of an online meeting with the parent body.
The meeting is portrayed as a torrent of initially banal instant messages that veer into awesome vituperation (amid much babble about “natural” remedies). And it is Suzanne, erstwhile guardian of consensus, who leads the charge against official health advice that all students must get the jab.
That antic sequence deftly scrambles our attention between the five board members huddled in front of a webcam and the chaos playing out on the screen (which features some choice emoticons).
The implication is that genuine communication has become impossible in a hyperconnected world. Indeed, language itself has degenerated here into a mush of cliches and filler words (with Kae Alexander’s polyamory enthusiast, Meiko, being the worst offender).
Under Roy Alexander Weise’s direction, the cast do a fine job of making all this sound authentically Californian for an hour and 45 minutes.
Eureka Day then shifts in a more traditional theatrical direction as Suzanne explains the source of her anti-vax stance to Ayesha Antoine’s Carina, the sole board member with any claim to be the voice of reason.
The aim here is to elicit some sympathy for her obdurate character. Suzanne’s case nonetheless remains devoid of substance, which creates a dramatic weakness, as there can be no honest way of contriving a balanced argument between the rival camps.
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The action regains a more coherent structure as it moves towards its denouement. Stephen Brennan’s Don, the principal, is ostensibly a waffling buffoon. But he ultimately reveals himself to be a shrewd operator whose woke bromides mask a keen instinct for self-preservation along with a firm grasp of procedure and financial realities.
Money proves to be the only way of resolving conflict when all earnestly purport to have no wish to impose their views on anyone else.
That swipe at Bay Area pieties also suggests a broader critique of liberal uncertainty. When we are committed to agree to disagree, how are we supposed to pursue any common purpose?
Eureka Day is at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, March 7th
