‘Eureka Day’ Playwright Jonathan Spector Talks Vaccines, Getting Canceled By Trump And A Possible Film Adaptation Of His Newly Controversial Comedy – Deadline Q&A

When Jonathan Spector first staged his now-Tony-nominated play Eureka Day in 2017, he couldn’t have known just how timely it would be eight years later. The Manhattan Theatre Club’s Broadway production, directed by Anna D. Shapiro, was a twice-extended hit with critics and audiences last fall, earning raves for its very funny look at the chaos and infighting that erupts at the very progressive (and fictional) Eureka Day School in Berkeley, California, when a mumps outbreak forces the board of directors to issue a vaccine mandate.

After the production closed in November, the plan for Eureka Day was a staging at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Then along came Donald Trump in February, taking over as the Kennedy Center chairman, filling the board with his acolytes. Scheduled shows began disappearing from the arts institution line-up, and one of the first to go – for “financial reasons,” the center said – was Eureka Day.

Deadline spoke with Spector about the cancellation – his response might surprise you – as well as how he came to write this season’s funniest scene on Broadway that didn’t feature Mary Todd Lincoln. (See a clip of the scene below.)

Eureka Day has been nominated for two Tony Awards: Best Revival of a Play and Best Featured Actress in a Play for Jessica Hecht. In addition to Hecht, the original Broadway cast featured Amber Gray, Bill Irwin, Thomas Middleditch, Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz and Ebony Flowers.

This interview was condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Deadline: Did you ever think in 2017 that Eureka Day would fare as well as it has, or that it would be so on point in 2025?

SPECTOR: I certainly never imagined that it would have so much life beyond Berkeley. You know, it was commissioned for a theater in Berkeley – and I was living in Berkeley – and really I was just trying to write something that would be the most Berkeley thing I could for that audience and that theater. And people responded really positively to it in that first production in Berkeley, but you know, I didn’t really know if that was just because people like seeing themselves reflected on stage. Would it actually resonate with anybody outside of Berkeley?

So it was really exciting to see how much people connected to it I guess in that classic universality through specificity kind of thing.

And then with the pandemic, I was very strange. Any time you write a play, at least when I write a play but I think most people, you become very obsessed with something to the degree that you’re much more obsessed with it than everybody else and they get annoyed hearing you talk about it. So it was very strange that what felt like a private obsession of mine became sort of a global obsession. We all had to wrestle with these ideas and these terms and these realities and these choices.

DEADLINE: So was there something specific that piqued your interest in the subject of vaccines three years before Covid?

SPECTOR: Yeah. There had been a little sort of controversy uptick in California because in 2014 there was an outbreak of measles at Disneyland and at that point California had one of the loosest vaccine requirements in the country and had what’s called a personal belief exemption. So, you could just say I don’t believe in vaccines and then that was it. And then following that outbreak, a couple of years later they changed to have one of the strictest school vaccination requirements in the country.

There was a lot of agita about that, and so it was sort of in the air a little bit but more specifically it was having the experience a couple of times of talking to somebody who was a friend or an acquaintance, somebody who was like really smart, at least as well educated as me, and more importantly with whom I shared pretty much all the same politics and values and then discovering they don’t vaccinate their kids. Like, how is that we can basically agree on everything except for this one thing where we seem to live in different realities? I was curious about that and sort of started to follow that.

Part of the impetus for writing it was also that at that time vaccines were maybe the only contentious issue that was not correlated with politics. Knowing somebody didn’t vaccinate their kids didn’t automatically tell you if they were liberal or conservative because there were vaccine skeptics on the fringes of both sides but they got there by different ways.

And then that got totally scrambled by COVID and by Trump and now if you know somebody doesn’t vaccinate their kids you can guess pretty well what their politics are. It was quite shocking because I had done all these interviews with experts when I was researching the play and one thing everybody would say is that we know it’s extremely difficult to change people’s minds about vaccines once they have a firmly held view, and then that turned out not to be true when Donald Trump gets involved. He can actually change the points of view of enormous numbers of people on both sides.

A woman I interviewed who had not vaccinated her kids and she herself was not vaccinated but when Covid hit she got the Covid vaccine as quickly as possible in part I think because not getting the vaccine was what the Trump people did and she didn’t want to be associated with that. Whether that was conscious or not I think that dynamic was sort of at play.

DEADLINE: For so many of us who grew up with vaccines as just a part of life, who are old enough to have the little round smallpox vaccine scar on our arms, the vax skepticism just seemed to come out of nowhere. Did it start with the quickly debunked autism correlation?

SPECTOR: I think that was a shift, and now it is so strongly enforced by the fractured way we receive information with social media and TikTok. The thing that I think is very strange about this current moment is that historically if you had a community that had a low rate of vaccination and there was an outbreak and people got sick, suddenly everybody was like oh shit I’ve got to get vaccinated. But that isn’t happening now even while we’re having the biggest measles outbreak in decades and kids have died. Whether it’s partisan identity or information, something strange is happening where even kids dying is not breaking through. It’s just pretty scary.

And it doesn’t help when you have the official information from the Department of Health and Human Services coming out and promoting skepticism of vaccines. You know, in that live stream scene in the play there’s this comment that I had kind of gone back and forth about whether I should cut it because I was like maybe it’s just too extreme, but it’s where somebody says something about how all these vaccines are made from the cells of dead fetuses, and then Robert Kennedy said that in a press conference two weeks ago.

DEADLINE: I was going to ask you about that scene later but since you brought it up let’s talk about it. Besides, we’re sounding way too serious because one thing everyone needs to understand about Eureka Day is that it is a funny, funny play. Describe the scene you’re talking about.

SPECTOR: Sure. So, the school had started to have these big town hall meetings where they’d get everybody together and endlessly talk for hours and hours whenever they had a kind of issue to work through. But now they’re dealing with an outbreak of mumps so they can’t gather in person. Instead they decide to have a sort of live streamed conversation, with the board of directors all in a room together and then the parents at home watching and commenting [in a chat box].

It begins to go very quickly off the rails with the parents both kind of sidetracking the conversation for their own obsessions, which is what always happens to online conversations. But there’s also the disconnect of having the board in a room reading the comments as people get more and more worked up and vicious with each other as always happens in conversations like this. Back in the pre-Covid days of 2017 people didn’t know that this was such a bad idea.

DEADLINE: You must have done tons of research just to see how people talk on the internet because you absolutely nailed it.

SPECTOR: You know, I hadn’t myself been in a lot of conversations like that yet when I was writing that scene in 2017. I mean the technology in the play was Facebook Live, which I think now is forgotten technology but it was what people were beginning to use at the time for this kind of thing.When I was researching the play I was looking at internet message boards where people would argue with each other about vaccines and they would just get so nasty with each other.

DEADLINE: I’d guess most people who have not seen the play imagine it is pro-vax and hard on the anti-vaxers. But one of the characters, Suzanne, played by Jessica Hecht who is up for a Tony, is very anti-vaccine and she’s so sympathetic and she’s so smart and engaging that we start thinking well maybe she does have a point.

SPECTOR: The character has a bit of a tragic arc through the play in that she has committed her life to building this community and then because of this irreconcilable conflict that she’s ultimately forced to leave it. There is something tragic in that even if I personally disagree with her beliefs. But of course, anytime you’re writing anything..it’s much more interesting if the people you disagree have the most honest and complex reasons for thinking what they think rather than just being strong man idiots.

When I was researching the play I watched this sort of fake documentary by Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who first claimed the link between autism and vaccines and he lost his medical license on that. Of course he’s a charlatan but they also interview these parents who have kids with severe developmental disabilities that they believe was caused by a vaccine. Now even if I think they’re wrong about what they think happened, the pain they’re feeling is real. Something about that really hit me. Just because somebody may not be right doesn’t mean they’re not feeling all the things they’re feeling.

DEADLINE: The play begins as a sort of parody of these wealthy, privileged, California liberals who live in their little bubble, but then grows in other ways…

SPECTOR: No. I honestly never thought of it as a parody or even to some degree satire, but as a realistic portrayal, which I actually think is how it was received by people in Berkeley in 2017. One of the things that’s happened in the years since is that the space in the culture for quote, wokism and that was not even a word people were using at the time…People have a lot of feelings about it now, especially after the election, in a way that they didn’t back then. The play was received in 2017 kind of like, oh that’s just how these people in California are. It wasn’t freighted in the same way that it is now.

DEADLINE: Can I ask you about the Kennedy Center situation and what happened with Eureka Day getting canceled there?

SPECTOR: Had the show gone forward there, in a sense it would have been great to be having that conversation at the Kennedy Center at this moment when, you know, the director of Health and Human Services is a Kennedy who is creating a lot of real harm in the country by spreading vaccine and other kinds of medical misinformation.

But at the same time I think it would have been really difficult to be there because once Trump has appointed himself king of the Kennedy Center and they’ve fired a lot of people and pushed out a lot of artists for political reasons, I don’t know if it’s possible to be there and not on some level sort of be complicit in all that. So if a show is a big hit and they sell out, then it can be claimed as proof of how well they’re doing. On the other hand if nobody comes to see it then what’s the point of doing it at all. I feel like you’re caught in an impossible situation as an artist.

DEADLINE: Do you feel you were pushed out for political reasons?

SPECTOR: I don’t exactly know how it went down but I was, in the end, relieved that we weren’t going there. I feel like there were really good compelling arguments on both sides. I just had a play in Florida at a theater called Miami New Drama and it’s run by a man named Michel Hausmann who fled Venezuela because of anti-Semitism and political oppression, and he was saying, “No, you should fight to stay because the mistake we made in Venezuela was giving up our cultural spaces too easily rather than forcing them to take them away from us.”

I was really compelled by that but I was also compelled by the idea that you can’t be there and make your work with clean hands.

DEADLINE: The official word from the Kennedy Center is that it’s truly financial decisions that were driving these cancellations but when you look at the shows that were canceled, there was Eureka Day and there was the kid’s musical about a gay shark. There was gay pride programming that was canceled. You start seeing a pattern. I’m just curious if they actually conveyed anything to you or to your team what’s really happening?

SPECTOR: Nothing has ever been communicated that got to me of anybody explicitly saying that there’s a political reason.

DEADLINE: Where does Eureka Day go from here and who gets to see it? Are there any upcoming productions and is there any possibility of TV adaptation or a film?

SPECTOR: Yes to all of those things. There are conversations about a film adaptation. There had been earlier conversations about doing it as a series but I don’t really feel like it makes as much sense. So, yeah, I’ve had some conversations. And there will be a lot of regional productions and international productions next season, the fall season. It looks like Eureka Day will have a lot of life next season, which is really exciting.