City Theatre presents ‘Eureka Day,’ a comedy about parenting and the great vaccination divide
COMMENTARY by SHARON EBERSON
The drama of parenting can be fraught and terrifying. It also can be funny. Even hilarious.
And by drama, I mean every second forward, after the words, “You’re going to have a baby.”
As a parent, the funny can come in all shapes sizes. Often, it’s the best alternative to situations where you just might break down and cry.
Stage and cinema have tried and sometimes captured capsules of this phenomenon. Perhaps you’ve seen Rose Byrne’s anxiety-ridden, Oscar-nominated performance in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which has teeters on the edges of a dark comedy and harrowing horror.
I find I am still laughing as I follow the development of Brian Knavish’s There’s a Leprechaun Now?, “an adult comedy” about the extremes parents will go to for a kindergarten project. (A performance March 16, 2026, at the Greer Cabaret will serve as a fundraiser for Throughline Theater Company).
In the Tony Award-winning Eureka Day (Best Play Revival of 2025), arriving at City Theatre this week, affluent parents who have sent their children to a utopian high-achieving private school are faced with an unexpected and up-to-the-second quandary: a difference of opinion on vaccinations.
Based on surging numbers in mumps cases, Jonathan Spector’s play is set in the 2018-19 school year in Berkeley, California, during an outbreak of the mumps.
In the ongoing debate over vaccination safety, it must be noted that, “The MMR vaccine has reduced cases by over 99% since 1967, [but] the virus has re-emerged due to waning immunity, leading to outbreaks in schools and universities, often among young adults who have received two vaccine doses,” according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
But I digress. Somewhat.
The premise of Eureka Day drops us into the collision of parental anxiety, a health crisis, and a canyon-sized divide in parental opinion.
The New York Times called the work one of the “funniest plays of the year” during its 2024 Broadway run, after it debuted in the spring of 2018 in Berkeley. (Note: A play that has never been on Broadway is considered a revival if the Tony Administration Committee deems it a “classic” or part of the “popular repertoire.”)
Mining the humor in the vaccination divide, at a time when previously suppressed diseases are making a comeback, well, that’s what artists do. They dig into a topic to tickle our emotions and, hopefully, trigger our reasoning skills, in a way unique to the performing arts.
In its descriptor of Eureka Day, City Theatre notes that the play “skewers any sense of polite decorum,” although it takes place in that sanctum of quietude, the school library.
It is the place where parents regularly “debate and decide on how to create the perfect learning environment for their perfect children,” and where a Zoom conference about postponing a seventh-grade concert turns into a melee of opinions.
Max Pavel, Jalina McClarin, Desiree Mee Jung and John Shepard.
Directed by Adil Mansoor, the cast of Eureka Day includes Post-Gazette Performers of the Year Daina Griffith and John Shepard, Max Pavel, Jalina McClarin, and Desiree Mee Jung.
In November of last year, Griffith unleashed laughter in a “black comedy” (per Wikipedia), in barebones productions’ God of Carnage, as a parent whose son has lost teeth to a schoolyard bully.
The 2020s, so far, have been a minefield of parental choices when it comes to education, health, and educated choices regarding health.
For those of us of a certain age, the idea that getting the polio vaccine is a debatable issue is unimaginable. For those who were among the first parents to fret about, say, the efficacy of the chicken pox vaccine, which was introduced in 1995, we saw those results in classroom breakouts, until immunization became more accepted.
The vaccine has since reduced chickenpox cases in the U.S. by over 97%.
Now comes Eureka Day, and I am ready for a good, hearty laugh about a subject that more often makes me want to cry.
In such debates, I suppose, laughter is the best medicine.
CITY CONNECTS FOR ‘EUREKA DAY’
Thursday, March 12, 6:30 p.m. | Preshow community event: Featuring partners at Allegheny County Immunization Coalition, Allegheny County Health Department, Center for Research Ethics, Literacy Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Linden Pre-K, and the Trusted Messenger Program. Mingling and light bites from Graze Craze before the 7:30 p.m. performance.
Sunday, March 15, 2 p.m. | Post-Show Talkback — With Dr. Amesh Adalja, Senior Scholar from John Hopkins Center for Health Security, and Dr. Jillian Irwin, Medical Director and Deputy Director of Clinical Services at the Allegheny County Health Department.
Friday, March 20, 7:30 p.m. | Post-Show Greenroom Art and Afterparty — An activity with the Kamin Science Center.
Sunday, March 22, 2 p.m. | Post-Show Talkback — With Chad Hermann, VP of Communication & Strategy for the Trusted Messenger Program, and the cast of Eureka Day.
Upcoming CitySpeaks: A New Play Podcast — Featuring Dr. Amesh Adalja, Senior Scholar from John Hopkins Center for Health Security, and Dr. Kristal Ross, Member at Large from Allegheny County Immunization Coalition.
TICKETS AND DETAILS
City Theatre’s production of Eureka Day runs through March 29, 2026, on the Main Stage, 1300 Bingham Street, South Side. Tickets: Visit https://citytheatrecompany.org/production/100836/eureka-day or call 412-431-2489. Discounts available are listed here.
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