Eureka Day at Boise Contemporary Theater

Or: “No one here’s a villain.”

How nice the world would be if we would all just get along. This is not just a wish at the Eureka Day School in Berkeley California, but a way of life. Every decision made by the School committee is made by consensus, all hands to the wheel. Fine and good for the day to day (despite some simmering resentments) but a mumps outbreak at this crunchy utopia over the 2018/2019 school year, finds that not everyone stands on common ground, and some beliefs are cherished more than others.

Written by Jonathan Spector, Eureka Day is a delicately balanced drama. It’s laughs are the chuckles you get from the minutia of board etiquette (and the particular double speak common to certain political persuasions), but no one tips over into character and when the play lands its kicks they go right to the belly. No one is made a caricature and the debate over vaccination (an electrified touchstone that has only gotten more volatile with time) is weighed with equanimity.

One brilliant if difficult moment to capture is, early in the crisis when Don (Joe Conley Golden) the prevaricating principal holds a video conference for the school. The chat section of the call is helpfully displayed on a board. I object to screens on stage on principal (it splits the attention of the audience and is a minefield of potential problems) but here the chaos of the Group Chat is exquisitely executed.

While all five members of the board are weighed and judged by the outbreak the principal tension lies between Carina (Alexis Ward), the “new parent oversight” and Suzanne (Marissa Price) who comes from one of the school’s founding families. Ward has a masterful command of side eye, and as the newcomer and (to Carina’s mind at least, and perhaps ours) only sane woman in the room, she gently draws our attention and keeps it, while we wait for her to puncture the echo chamber in which she finds herself encased. Price fits perfectly into a wonderful written role, a true tragic heroine: a gentle crusader, unwilling to call names or take points, but with her heels dug down to the bedrock. Between them on various scales lie Eli (Matthew Melton) local shouty white man ™ but, weirdly, sweet; and Meiko (Hanna-Lee Sakakibara) who’s cheerful demeanor hides all sorts of secrets.

Golden’s Don is luminous. With his rainbow shirts and mime aspirations Don is only trying to do right by everyone, which means of course that he can do right by no-one. “A Great Captain,” Suzanne remarks, “Until he sees an iceberg.” Golden best balances the laughs of the production ( I don’t know if his Scone-Work is Spector’s writing or the actor’s own but it was carried out beautifully) and can land a devastatingly brilliant turn in a look and a lilt.

All this action, this struggle for the lives of children and the soul of a community takes place in a school library: conjured before us with all the warmth and raggedness of such spaces. Schools whatever their philosophy and wherever they are set live and die by their participants and it takes only one bad apple to spoil the bunch (or infect the populous, as the case may be).  A sign hung unobtrusively in the corner declares to its young charges, “You Are Safe Here.” How nice if that were true.