3 hours ago
Published March 19, 2026 at 5:30 AM EDT
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Americans have been asking “Can’t we all just get along?” since before the Civil War.
Often, the answer is “no.”
Jonathan Spector’s play “Eureka Day,” making its Pittsburgh premiere at City Theatre, depicts what happens to even a group of people who might seem highly compatible when a single hot issue scorches the earth between them.
That issue is childhood vaccination, and one notable thing about Spector’s often riotous comedy is that it’s set mostly in 2018, the very year the play premiered. Anti-vaccine movements are as old as vaccination itself. But as “Eureka Day” reminds us, the locus of anti-vax sentiment just eight years ago was politically liberal communities like Berkeley, Calif., which is both the play’s setting and home in real life to Aurora Theatre Company, the stage troupe that commissioned it.
Such a setting would have seemed unremarkable at the time, and today it’s fascinating how quickly political coding around the issue changed during the pandemic. In short, let’s just say it’s hard to imagine any of Spector’s five characters on stage — an administrator at a progressive private school and the four parents who round out its executive committee — having voted for Donald Trump in 2016, whether they’re anti-vax or not.
But such broad-strokes alignment proves of little help after a mumps outbreak shuts down the school and the committee is forced to deal with the previously trivial-seeming fact that the parents of many students have opted out of standard vaccinations.
“Eureka Day” has won multiple awards and got a Broadway production in 2024. But it hit many people’s radar only about a year ago, when a planned Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Kennedy Center was among the earliest shows to be canceled after President Trump took over as board chair. MTC cited financial challenges, but it’s easy to imagine the notoriously anti-vax administration objecting to a play that — though it roundly mocks progressive pieties — is very much in favor of childhood vaccinations.
City Theatre’s smart and highly entertaining production, directed by Adil Mansoor, features a strong ensemble cast spotlighting Daina Michelle Griffith as anti-vax mom Suzanne.
Highlights include a virtual community meeting between the committee and offstage parents, who appear only as chat avatars on a projection above the stage. The way the escalating comment wars get all the laughs — drowning out the onstage actors and any attempt at on-point discussion — uproariously spoofs how such meetings can go in real life.
But playwright Spector also makes subtler points, for instance about how the deep-seated beliefs that feed willful ignorance can turn common words meaningless. Think you can build “consensus” around values like “safety”? Try it when half the people think “safety” means “vaccinate” and the other half think it means “don’t vaccinate.” (And don’t even ask about “genuine scientific disagreement.”)
As of this writing, one state in our union is experiencing a big measles outbreak and the number of cases nationally this year is running about three times ahead of 2025. History shows that routine vaccinations like MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) can avoid this sort of thing. “Eureka Day” is an insightful if also hilarious take on how we take on the issue — even if it seems to conclude that, at best, only most of us can get along.
Performances continue through March 29.
