By all appearances, the Eureka Day school in Oakland, California, is a progressive, welcoming, warm-hearted place. The shelves of the elementary school’s library, as staged at Samuel J Friedman Theatre in a sharp new play by Jonathan Spector, boast a colorful, cacophonous overflow of books. There’s a prominent “social justice” section; the walls are bedecked with posters celebrating the likes of Maya Angelou, Michelle Obama, Cesar Chavez and the concept of DEI. (Convincing set design by Todd Rosenthal.) The school’s puttering five-person executive board – often, in this play directed by Anna D Shapiro, sitting on chairs meant for children – are adept at the language of deference for the sake of conflict avoidance: “deeper learning”, “holding space”, “in my personal experience”, and on and on.
If this all sounds tedious, well, so is the high-wire act of trying not to offend anyone. Luckily for audiences and a first scene that teeters on the edge of caricature – it’s too easy to laugh at woke-addled characters who hold “community activated conversations” – harmony is difficult to uphold in, you know, these times. It’s the 2018-19 school year, and Eureka Day faces an outbreak of the mumps.
