Eureka Day

Description

MACo is proud to present celebrated California-based playwright Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day in the Anderson Studio, which will be transformed into an intimate black box theater for the occasion.

Winner of the 2025 Tony Award, Drama Desk and Drama League Awards for Best Revival, Eureka Day originated at the Aurora Theater Company in Berkeley California in 2018, had it’s New York premier Off Broadway in 2019, its European premier at the Old Vic in London in 2022 and landed on Broadway in December 2024. It is a startlingly relevant and original piece of work.

“The Eureka Day School in Berkeley, California, is a bastion of progressive ideals: representation, acceptance, social justice. In weekly meetings Eureka Day’s five board members develop and update policy to preserve this culture of inclusivity, reaching decisions only by consensus. But when a mumps outbreak threatens the Eureka community, facts become subjective and every solution divisive, leaving the school’s leadership to confront the central question of our time: How do you build consensus when no one can agree on truth?”

Eureka Day is so brilliantly yoked to the current American moment—its flighty politics, its deadly folly—that it makes you want to jump out of your skin… The play’s most astonishingly accurate moment comes when the board convenes a livestream… I’m still trying to figure out how hard is appropriate for a critic to laugh at the theatre; this night, I made myself hoarse.” —The New Yorker.
 
MACo’s second fully mounted production of the 2026 season is “the perfect play for our age of disagreement. …characters who had seemed so easy to ridicule as stereotypes acquire a substance and specificity that inhibit both derision and facile categorization. It becomes possible to identify with each of these people. This means that Eureka Day…is not only one of the funniest plays to open this year, it is one of the saddest.” —The New York Times.

In an interview with the playwright, “Jonathan Spector and the Politics of Listening” by Craig Byrd, Spector says that he always begins work on a play with a question he does not understand, then he researches, interviews, and tries to understand how other people think, “When you’re not trying to convince someone of anything—just listening—it’s so human.”  Eureka Day asks us to consider that people speak and believe as they do for real reasons, and that even differing profoundly, they may achieve good things together.

Directed by Rebecca Strum, the cast includes Guest Equity actress Ashley Nicole Baptiste, Sorsha Anderson, Eric Reid St. John, Alexandria Chang, Tyler Rackliffe, and Lindsay Repka,.