Review: EUREKA DAY at 4TH Wall Theatre Company

I was shocked to find out that EUREKA DAY was written by Jonathan Spector back in 2018, a good bit before the pandemic and way before our current vaccine woes. The show is hilarious, but it is also immensely prescient, and speaks to today even harder than it did seven years ago. Fourth Wall Theatre Company has a revival right now, and boy, does it feel timed for the right moment in Texas politics. It deals in a smart and funny way with vaccines and the whole debate around them. It’s more comedy than drama, but you are going to be thinking a lot about how it presents a debate on whether “to vax or not to vax.” Hamlet didn’t even have to struggle with THAT one. 

The play itself is pretty straightforward in that we are watching an advisory board for a private school in Berkley, California, meet to discuss an outbreak of the mumps in their student population. This group is made up of one school administrator and four parents of enrolled children. What they have to suss out is whether or not vaccines should be required to attend their school. Oh, and did I mention they need a consensus to pass a protocol? So, as you can imagine, it is off to the races with vaxxers taking on anti-vaxxers with passion and vitriol. And we are in California, so expect a lot of “touchy-feely and woke” approaches to every angle of this. And that may be why bringing this play up now is a great reminder of how each side of the aisle has its own peculiar stances that sometimes seem performative and unnecessary. Yet in this modern world, belief is a passion, and an “us versus them” mentality is part of our fabric. So maybe EUREKA DAY is a dark comedy in many ways.  

Fourth Wall Theatre Company always seems to be an “actor’s theater,” and they continue this streak with this play. The cast of six folks is all wonderfully integrated as an ensemble, and they just feel like wholly realized people every second of the performance. Philip Lehl makes for a wonderful soft-spoken administrator who is baffled at how to handle the onslaught of parental opinions about vaccinations. He’s flustered and wonderfully frazzled! Jasmine Renee Thomas is the “newest addition” to the advisory board, a lesbian mom who has just moved into the school area. Jasmine plays her part as wanting to always be friendly, yet underneath, we know she has some firm convictions that are just dying to come out in a more forceful way. She’s a blast to watch “almost boil” for an hour and forty minutes. Nick Farco is a wonderfully, secretly sleazy rich stay-at-home dad. Laine Chan gets to be a woman who seems mild-mannered and only there to knit her blanket and keep calm, but she gets to let loose now and then, and it is hilarious when she does. Elijah Eliakim Hernandez gets a nice cameo, and they reveal everything you need to know just by showing up. My favorite performance of EUREKA DAY has to be from Kim Tobin-Lehl. She creates a woman who could easily be dismissed as just a “scone offering,” Karen, but Kim makes her real and whole. She delivers a crucial monologue in the play that just hits home everything the script is trying to say. It’s a master class in how not to ever judge a character as a performer, but allow them to become who they are. 

Jennifer Dean directed the show, and she really knows how to lead a group and hit the right notes in both comedy and serious moments. Her staging is inventive, especially given the three-quarter thrust configuration of this house. Mark A. Lewis’s scene design is jaw-dropping, and it looks like John Moore executed the build wonderfully. I can never get over the way that this company handles sets that look like they could easily be put up on Broadway. Lights from Jack Jacobs work well, creating spaces within the set on the fly throughout the show. Nile Helgerud’s costumes capture each character perfectly in a witty way. And Michael Mullins gets to almost steal the entire show with a group chat that comes to life before our very eyes! It’s so effective and so hysterical. 

You could just call EUREKA DAY a fun and lively comedy and be done with it. It’s excellently produced by Fourth Wall - acting is great, tech is a notch above anybody else in town, and the fast-paced show will be an audience pleaser from the start. But there’s something deeper happening here, and something that gets under your skin (ironically, like a vaccine). There is an urgency to this debate about children and vaccines that seems to encapsulate everything happening in our world today. No matter where you fall, you sort of feel attacked. It’s discomforting, even though it makes you laugh. That’s the part that will leave with you, and you will take that home long after the bows. It’s a wonderful credit to the power of art to feel so relevant and so essential to making us talk with each other. 

Houston Awards - Live Stats

Best Musical - Top 3

1. BRIGHT STAR (Spark Theater)

7.5% of votes

2. ROCK OF AGES (Standing Ovation Theatre)

6.3% of votes

3. THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA (The Sankofa Collective)

6% of votes

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