Don (Howard Swain, center) reacts to livestream comments projected above in Eureka Day at the Marin Theatre while (from left) Suzanne (Lisa Anne Porter), Carina (Leontyne Mbele-Mbong), Eli (Teddy Spencer), and Meiko (Charisse Loriaux) look on. Photo by David Allen.
By WOODY WEINGARTEN
To call Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Thursday appearance before the Senate Finance Committee’s three-hour hearing contentious would be a monumental understatement.
Multiple Democrat and Republican senators charged him with making non-logical, false, and misleading claims about vaccines. The Secretary of Health and Human Services futilely struggled to pull answers out of his back pocket.
Humor: Absent.
Eureka Day, a play that also tackles the chasm between vax and not vax, uses satire to make you laugh louder and longer than you’ve ever done before in a theater during a single scene.
Laughter: Infectious.
Also contagious in the 105-minute play is a 15-student outbreak of mumps that ultimately triggers a debate about whether to mandate vaccinations at a private, progressive Berkeley elementary school where white privilege blankets the place.
A five-member executive committee keeps trying to reach a mandatory consensus when consensus is light years away.
The fast-paced comedy, which debuted in 2018 at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley, is being partnered by that company at the Marin Theater in Mill Valley — despite the Aurora having to cancel its current East Bay season because of a money drain.
The Marin production’s being directed masterfully by Josh Costello, Aurora’s artistic director who also held the reins for the original version.
A caveat: The hilarious scene, featuring livestream comments projected on the rear wall of the set, is abruptly followed by an incredibly heavy change of pace (even though it’s sandwiched by many other moments that are less funny yet still quite amusing).
Each of the five main actors in the ensemble cast is phenomenal.
Howard Swain, who’s transcended so many roles in so many Bay Area venues that if you blink, you might find he’s already booked for 17 more, becomes Don, school executive committee leader with tangled white hair and white beard who desperately quashes potential squabbles. On occasion, he’ll read an indecipherable bit of prose or poetry to the others in a hopeful but valueless teaching moment.
Swain is in the minority, a performer who wasn’t plucked out of the original for this rendition. Ditto Leontyne Mbele-Mbong (Carina).
Eli (Teddy Spencer) embraces Meiko (Charisse Loriaux) amid emotional and intellectual turmoil. Photo by David Allen.
But the other three main characters — Charisse Loriaux (Meiko), Lisa Anne Porter (Suzanne), and Teddy Spencer (Eli) — are all vets of the original show. Clearly, the time between the first production and the revival hasn’t in the least diminished their mastery of their parts. Their range of emotions, their skill at showing feelings with a nuanced look or gesture, their ability to have learned about four zillion words from the script without blowing any, all that may have honed their chops.
One lady leaving the first row could be overheard to put it succinctly: “The cast is perfect!”
Another perfect fit is the jazz between scenes (unless, of course, you’re as anti-jazz as one character is anti-vax).
Eureka Day, which won the 2025 Tony for best revival for its Broadway run, has been performed in Austria, South Australia, and the United Kingdom.
The playwright, Jonathan Spector, a Berkeley boy, has made a few changes since his first effort. However, he’s kept everyone on stage skirting issues and being afraid of saying anything that another exec committee member might take offense at — and he’s inserted tons of swearing and characters interrupting and talking over each other like most real folks do.
That noisy writing strategy might resemble David Mamet’s style but Spector’s is funnier.
Eureka Day will run at the Marin Theatre, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley, through Sept. 21. Tickets: $38 to $89 (plus $6 handling fee). Info: 415-388-5208 or www.marintheatre.org.
Sherwood “Woody” Weingarten, a longtime voting member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle and the author of four books, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitalitypress.com.
