Can a Play About Vaccines Be a Laughing Matter?

The conversation does not go well.

“We’re all threatened by your ANTI-SCIENCE DEATH CULT,” one parent offers.

“Do what you want,” comes the reply, “just keep your POISON off my kids.”

Jonathan Spector, 40, who wrote “Eureka Day,” said that he started thinking about vaccines as a subject after moving with his girlfriend, now his wife, to the Bay Area. When their friends started having children, whispers began to circulate at farmers markets and house parties that this person or that person was refusing the shots.

“I had this experience of talking to people who were very smart, very well educated, and sort of agreed with me about everything,” Spector said. “And then you would realize that in this one area, they seem to live on a different planet than you do.”

“Eureka Day,” which is in previews and opens in New York on Thursday at Walkerspace in a Colt Coeur production, follows four parents and the principal as the school faces down the mumps — and as the perceived good of the individual crashes into the good of the group.

It arrives in New York as public health officials struggle to contain an outbreak of measles, and it pulls at a larger thread many feel unraveling around us: What do you do when you cannot agree on basic facts?

The divisions do not track along typical political battle lines, Spector added, making it richer material for a playwright.

“Abortion or gun control or climate change — any one of those things is predictive of all the others, but not vaccines,” he said. “There are vaccine skeptics on the far left and on the far right,” and, he added, it is more difficult to wave them off as unthinking nincompoops if they otherwise agree with you.

Indeed, “Eureka Day,” which is already scheduled for productions in Philadelphia, Washington and Sonoma County, California, gives the anti-vaccine parents their humanity, though it does not buy their arguments. Spector said it makes him uncomfortable even discussing the play in terms of the “vaccination debate.”

“I don’t feel like it’s a debate,” he said. “From my point of view, the science is settled.”

Nonetheless, Josh Costello, the artistic director of Aurora Theater Company in Berkeley, which commissioned the play and staged its world premiere last year, said that anti-vaccine audience members who saw it seemed comfortable with their portrayal.

“We spent a lot of time talking about how we wanted the play to accurately represent people’s points of view without validating a point of view with which we disagree,” Costello said. “That’s a really fine line to walk.”

Another pleasant surprise, Costello said, were the wails of laughter that came from the audience during the group chat scene.

“I’ve never seen anything like it, the audience was roaring with laughter for like seven straight minutes,” he said. “We had to redo some of the cues to make it less funny so the audience could hear the dialogue and the key lines.”

Spector said that, after discovering at the New College of Florida that he was a terrible actor, he set out to become a director. While he had always written, he said, “I didn’t realize that writing plays was still a thing people really did in the world.” But as he moved from project to project, “what was appealing to me,” he added, “was being able to be intimate with this writing I was really excited about.”

He read hundreds of scripts a year as the literary manager of the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and went on to get an MFA in playwriting from San Francisco State University.

Spector lives in Oakland with his wife, Molly Aaronson-Gelb, and their 3-year-old daughter Maisie, who he said tries to rope other children into acting out plays at school. The couple are co-artistic directors of a small company, Just Theater, which they founded in 2006.

Aaronson-Gelb is a director as well as a high school drama teacher, and some of her experiences, both as a private school student in the Bay Area and in previous teaching jobs, inspired the “Eureka Day” setting. (It was the school she attended that cheered for opposing teams.)

“Eureka Day” is Spector’s first production in New York. It will be directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt, who was nursing her 2-month-old daughter Esme in the rehearsal room this month while giving the actors notes.

Her husband, Brian Wiles, plays Eli, a parent awash in self-satisfaction and tech money; every now and then he gave Esme googly eyes from his seat.

One directorial challenge: managing the laugh lines in that chat scene, where Facebook comments will be projected behind the actors for the audience to read.

“The build at the end felt the most right it’s felt,” Thomas Jay Ryan, who portrays the principal, said after one run-through.

“You keep saying, ‘Oh they’re going to be screaming laughing — in Berkeley they were screaming laughing.’ Well, OK,” he added. “That’s the kiss of death!”

But for Campbell-Holt, balancing the laughs and the flare-ups in “Eureka Day” is no longer just a theatrical exercise.

“As a new mom,” she said later, “my awareness of this public health crisis has really shifted to being much more immediate. It’s personal.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.