By SHARON EBERSON
High winds and power outages this past weekend ushered in theater openings featuring provocative spins on hot-button issues, told with powerful performances.
From uproarious laughter, to shock and empathy, the well-intended grownups of Eureka Day at City Theatre evoke a Kennywood coaster of emotions.
The board members of a private elementary school, whose mascot is a guinea pig, are about to be thrust out of their comfort zone as the 2018-2019 school year begins. Meeting at the school’s enviably well-stocked children’s library, we get to know the quintet’s quirks, their priorities, and their, um, affairs, as well as the lengths parents will go to accommodate everyone’s feelings.
You can always spot a Eureka Day kid, notes Carina, a new mom at the school, because “at soccer games, they’re the ones who cheer when the other team scores.” At Eureka, how do you get past problematic references when presenting Peter Pan? You set the play in outer space, of course.
The board members are played by the Fab Five of Daina Griffith, Max Pavel, John Shepard, Jalina McClarin, and Desiree Mee Jung, each representing the complexities of parental responsibility, amplified by one of the funniest scenes I’ve seen on any stage, and the drama that follows.
A mumps outbreak in the first weeks of the 2018-2019 school year has caused the local health department to order a school shutdown, and the board, which has just welcomed newcomer Carina (McClarin), has to decide how to handle the messaging to parents, and under what circumstances they will reopen.
Suzanne (Griffith), as usual, tries to bend everyone to her will. She is among Eureka’s founders, and her preference is to stay the course within the school’s bylaws, and continue to allow parental choice where vaccinations are concerned.
Upsetting her plans is a petition that would allow a return to the classroom only for immunized students, which seems to Shepard’s Don — a school administrator and an apparent practitioner in the zen art of calm — the perfect excuse for an online “Community Activated Conversation” among parents.
in Eureka Day at City Theatre. (Image: Kristi Jan Hoover)
The colorful, kid-friendly set design by Sasha Jin Schwartz employs giant window shades for projections, allowing the audience to see the livestream comments that the board members are viewing on Don’s laptop screen. Always the peacemaker, he has invited a pediatrician into the discussion, hoping to have someone of authority to answer any questions.
It is not to be. Respect goes AWOL. Belligerence reigns.
For the parents of Eureka Day, the conversation devolves into unbridled “I’m right! You’re wrong!” name-calling. Cries of “Big Pharma!,” “Fascism!,” and the use of a single emoji, over and over, become rib-ticklers, with the urgency of children’s safety seemingly lost in the frenzy.
There was so much laughter during this livestream scene, I could not hear most of what the actors were saying. Instead, I concentrated on John Shepard’s face, imagining steam coming from Don’s ears as he tried desperately for a kinder, more reasonable approach.
Don should have known better. The image of the horrified five, amid echoes of laughter, led into intermission.
The return to the stage for the second act was a quick reality check. Arguments about the outbreak were recalibrated, and nothing was quite what it had seemed while we shook with laughter just 15 minutes before.
Up to this point, Griffith’s Suzanne has carried her air of superiority like a torch, having had several children go through the school. You can see her sizing up Carina, a Black woman who has left public school behind and already seen a positive change in her son. Inevitably, Suzanne miscalculates.
Jung’s Meiko would seem to be the quiet one, although we soon learn that she has a secret to keep. When she does speak up, Suzanne interrupts, with the enormously annoying, “What Meiko meant to say was …” She gets called on it, yet she persists.
Eli is described as a stay-at-home dad, which is true on the surface. His unseen wife travels for business, while he takes advantage of their, um, open marriage. Eli would seem to be a cad, but Pavel is too likeable to be as smarmy as I want him to be. It’s hard to root against him – harder still when trauma strikes.
Interrelationships and personal revelations feed into the vaccination debate in expected and unexpected ways. We learn in a most heart-wrenching way that immunization is not a guarantee against getting the disease.
While still grappling on opposite sides, Griffith’s Suzanne makes an unforgivable assumption about Carina and her family, yet revelations about past trauma turn the tables on what we thought we knew about her.
When Suzanne breaks down her fortress of superiority, allowing depths of vulnerability to emerge, the result is as heart-wrenching as the livestream was hilarious.
Playwright Spector has said that the idea for Eureka Day, the 2025 Tony Award winner as Best Revival of a Play, came from a pre-COVID outbreak of the mumps in Berkeley, California. The real-life debate it sparked is a scenario that continues as timely as when it was first staged — perhaps moreso, with noted vaccine skeptic Robert Kennedy Jr. as our United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, and with measles making a comeback in some states.
You may walk into Eureka Day leaning one way about vaccinations. But you assuredly will leave with a better understanding of the many different ways people approach immunizations, and how personal choice and the greater good are inexorably intertwined.
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 at https://citytheatrecompany.org/ct_home/promotions.
‘THE SMUGGLER’ AT PICT
If there’s a more hot-button issue than vaccinations for once diminishing diseases, it is immigration and American attitudes toward immigrants. In a contest, they might run neck-and-neck.
Ronán Noone’s play, The Smuggler, gives us a contemporary tale, happening far from the ICE invasion of city streets. The solo show, all in verse, is about a poor Irish immigrant living in a town of New England 1-percenters.
Tim Finnegan is an aspiring writer and poet, a bartender whose workplace is closing. He’s married to a local girl and father to a young boy, and his accent immediately identifies where he’s from, which isn’t Massachusetts. He often feels the need to remind the listeners to his tale that he is a “cit-i-zan” — the better to rhyme with “Amer-i-can.” He’s not as lowly as the undocumented workers who come to the island to do manual labor.
Michael Patrick Trimm inhabits Tim, and every other character in his orbit, as he falls out with the American dream and into criminal acts that test the bounds of morality and decency. Just to be clear, it’s a charming, disarming performance; Trimm wills you to like Tim and understand his dilemma, that he feels forced to turn to cheating and stealing, for the sake of his family.
Trimm has become a major presence on Pittsburgh stages — City Theatre’s King James, Pittsburgh Public Theater’s Dial M for Murder, and barebones’ The Shark is Broken, to name just a few recent roles.
For PICT, he commands every inch of the Carnegie Stage, turned into a bar for the 75 minutes Trimm toys with our judgment, telling the twists in his story as inevitable, given his circumstances.
It seems to me that Tim’s woes are mostly about his inability to hold a job, more than his accent. Yet, his father-in-law has a simple, arrow-to-the-heart explanation to why he’s down and out: “You’re an immigrant!”
All the while, he pours a variety of drinks, sometimes for himself, often for the people at tables to his left and right.
When the wordplay or rhymes get a little Ozian (robberies and disease, polic-ery), he smooths things over with a wink, and turns up the charm. And when the next word is obvious, he calls on the audience to respond, further cementing a one-to-one relationship with a fellow who has become involved in smuggling undocumented workers and enabling their servitude.
The tables are turned over and over in Tim’s eventful life, but he still maintains a fierce wit and charisma, a storyteller who dares you to stop and think: How far would you go to protect your child? In his position, would you do as he has done?
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