TDF Stages

In Broadway's Eureka Day, the stage stalwart plays an anti-vaxxer who's hard to hate

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With her singsongy voice, kind eyes and innately sympathetic presence, two-time Tony nominee Jessica Hecht (Summer, 1976, A View From the Bridge) is the ideal actor to play Suzanne, an influential anti-vaxxer parent at a private Berkeley school in Jonathan Spector's sly dark comedy Eureka Day, currently on Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Initially, as Suzanne and the rest of the school's advisory board argue about issues of diversity and inclusion, she seems like a crunchy and clueless eccentric. But an outbreak of the mumps shows that she's also dangerous, yet Spector never treats her as a villain. Once you learn her full story, she is impossible to dismiss or completely dislike thanks to Hecht's moving performance.

Written in 2018 and set that same year, Eureka Day feels even more pertinent than it did during its New York debut Off-Off Broadway five years ago. Post-COVID pandemic with a vocal anti-vaxxer nominated to run the US Department of Health and Human Services, the timing of this brand-new production directed by Tony winner Anna D. Shapiro is uncanny. TDF Stages chatted with Hecht about the joys of playing such a complex character, the challenges of comedy and why Eureka Day is "one of the hardest plays" she's ever done.

Jen Gushue: You have two grown children. When they were younger, were you the PTA type?

Jessica Hecht: I was! I was super involved in something called the SLT, the School Leadership Team. I would also come in and participate in plays and things like that. I really loved that time in my kids' lives.

Gushue: Did you ever deal with contentious school meetings the way your character does in Eureka Day?

Hecht: They weren't as contentious as Eureka Day's, but yes. That feeling of beating your head against the wall was not unfamiliar to me. There's always somebody who has an idea, and they think it is the first time anyone's introduced this idea when it has come up every year. There's always a faction of people who have been around for a long time and are just feeling like, no, that's not gonna work.

But I think the passion of Eureka Day's characters is unique to a community where people feel very inspired to be activists. That is true to Berkeley, I think, from everything I've read and encountered with people from there.

Gushue: How would you describe your character, Suzanne?

Hecht: She is somebody who loves children and loves being part of this time in their lives when they're starting to experience school and friendships. That is her whole raison d'être. She feels very empowered by that and like her life has meaning because of that.

Gushue: In The Guardian's review of the 2022 London production of Eureka Day, the critic described the show as an "anti-woke satire" and an "attack on the liberal left," which seems reductive to me. What are your thoughts on that characterization of the play?

Hecht: I don't agree with it! And when I took the job, I didn't want it to be that. I was really nervous that it would be, but it's not. Anna is a beautifully insightful director and found a way to nurture us into a place that wasn't about it being a political statement, because satire really can only go so far. I don't think this play is anchored in us just trying to make the audience laugh at the foibles of the left. I genuinely think that Jonathan's intention and the intention of this production is to look at idealism in an empathetic way, and to look at how people become idealistic no matter what party you align yourself with. We all have these values that we hold in such a deeply personal way.

Gushue: In a less nuanced play, Suzanne might seem like the villain of the story, but there is a resistance to that interpretation baked into the script.

Hecht: Absolutely. The complexity of Suzanne is that she's not asking for other people to not vaccinate their children. She feels you should do whatever you feel is right. She believes that, as a parent, your responsibility is to take care of your kid. It would be very easy to take a play that has a hot-button theme and make it a polemic. But this play is one of the hardest plays I've done in a long time because it resists that. Comedy, as many people have said before, is so much harder than drama. And to do a comedy that lives in a place of serious issues is really complicated. To take the easy way out with this play would not be something I was interested in.

Gushue: The play and your character shift from comedy to drama. Is it challenging to make that transition?

Hecht: Suzanne wants everybody to be seen, and she wants things to be buoyant. A lot of times people who have that behavioral system have something very difficult at their core. I don't know anybody who behaves that way who doesn't have some seed of pain. Very often there's something really difficult that they have brilliantly crafted a way to override. So the transition isn't as hard as one would think.

Gushue: And Suzanne is, in theory, in a room of like-minded folks, at least in the way that they approach confrontation.

Hecht: I'm conflict averse as a human being, but many people like Suzanne love conflict. They enjoy the fireworks; it makes them feel alive that they can talk about things and fight about things. I tend to appreciate a calmer environment, but I think this school is based on a certain stimulus. And the characters love it.

Gushue: One of the funniest moments of conflict is when unseen Eureka Day parents fight in a Zoom chat. The characters onstage are drowned out by the audience laughing at the insults flying by on a giant screen. How do you play a scene like that when the focus is not on you?

Hecht: Jonathan told us that we should not worry so much about the content, but more about the sincerity and seriousness of our participation. We just try to focus on the meta of the whole thing. And it's quite wonderful because we don't get caught up in trying to do anything but approach it with utter seriousness. It feels like this is what they must have had going on in The Office, where there's this bizarre level of seriousness that inspires a lot of laughter.

Gushue: This play takes place pre-pandemic, when the anti-vax movement was loud but much less pervasive. It resonates even more in our post-COVID pandemic world. As attitudes evolve, do you think it will remain relevant?

Hecht: That's so interesting. It's a great question, actually. In the research done to write this play, Jonathan took a super scholarly approach, and we were able to read a lot of the dramaturgical material. In reality, people have been fixated on vaccines since the dawn of time, really. Think about the myth of Achilles and his mother trying to give her child immunity from death and holding his little heel. It is representative of our lifelong preoccupation with inoculating our children. As a parent and as somebody who is still engaged with young people in other work that I do, this idea of preventing your child from getting sick is an obsession that will never go away. So, I think the play has a timeliness and a timelessness that is very, very meaningful.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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