Two factors make this play ever so timely:  Reach back a handful of years and we have the COVID vaccine and all the debate it engendered  – – – and open the newspapers today and find vaccine denier Robert F. Kennedy being chosen to lead the Department of Health and Human Services in the next administration.  We are certainly in the middle of a vaccine conundrum!

Set in the library of a most liberal elementary school, the play has some of the sincere and well-earned laughs on Broadway.  Jessica Hecht is at the top of her game and pulls us in with every sigh.  BUT, Eureka Day has more in store for us than laughs, though, and the second half of the play, while occasionally funny, becomes intriguing and even heart-tugging as characters we think we have pegged reveal depths we hadn’t expected. As the peacemaking Don is wont to say, “there are no villains here.”  Try as we might to point fingers at a few, it becomes increasingly hard to do so given how expertly and compassionately the playwright Jonathan Spector has led us through the story.  He leads the audience to a conclusion with few answers, but many good questions.

My very favorite moments apart from the spot on casting and the brilliant Jessica Hecht is the scene in which they decide to take a section of the board meeting and turn it into a “Zoom call,” – – reaching out to as many parents as possible.  Anyone who has EVERY been on a Zoom call will recognize all the insanity that ensues when you try to blend a live meeting with a ZOOM call and the crazy that spins across the computer monitor in a ZOOM call.  It was a brilliant piece of stagecraft to see the ZOOM call projected on a giant screen at the same time as the actors on stage were working to include their views at the same time.  Hilarious!!!