Oakland Playwright on His Tony Nomination For Berkeley Satire ‘Eureka Day’

Spector talked with KQED’s Brian Watt about his Broadway debut, the serendipitous foresight of his story, and a Kennedy Center production that he’s grateful never came to fruition.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Brian Watt: Congrats on the Tony nomination! So when you first wrote it, did you think it would reach so many audiences?

Jonathan Spector: I was trying to write something that would feel like the most Berkeley play I could [give] as a gift to that audience. It was very well-received when we did it at Aurora, but even then, I had no idea if that was only because people enjoy seeing themselves on stage. I didn’t know if it would resonate or make sense to anyone beyond the Bay. And so it was quite surprising and gratifying to see that.

You wrote this and it was created before the pandemic, but it has remained timely. How did you get the idea for this?

The conversation around vaccines was floating in the ether. But at that time there had been that [2014-15] outbreak of measles at Disneyland that had led to the state changing its vaccination laws to become much stricter. But then it was more specifically having a couple of moments of being in conversation with friends or acquaintances, people who were smart, well-educated, who generally had the same politics that I do and the same values, and then realizing they didn’t vaccinate their kids, and just finding it so strange that we could basically have an entire shared worldview except for this one thing. So that was really interesting to me, and I was just trying to understand it. That is kind of where the play began.

Another reason this play is so timely is because many of the conversations around vaccine hesitancy were playing out when the COVID-19 vaccine was being rolled out. How do you think this issue has changed from the time when you wrote and first staged Eureka Day?

I mean, it’s completely different because part of what made it an interesting topic to explore in a play was that, at that time, it was maybe the only contentious issue that did not have a political valence to it. Knowing somebody didn’t vaccinate their kids at that time did not necessarily tell you anything about their politics. That became very scrambled during COVID and Trump, and now vaccination is much more correlated to politics in the way that everything else is.

So it allowed for, at the time, to be a play about an issue where you know people might deeply disagree about this one thing, but they basically agree about everything else and respect each other in general. That made it a much more interesting thing to explore.

I also remember interviewing some public health experts when I was researching the play. And one of the things they would tell you is, it’s just very, very hard to change someone’s mind about vaccination once they’ve made up their mind. And people have been quite surprised about how quickly and wildly people’s minds about vaccines have changed mostly for the bad after COVID, and after the way they’ve been politicized.

Eureka Day also got caught in the middle of politics earlier this year. It was going to be staged at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Then president Donald Trump took over as chairman in February, and your play was the first to go. The center said it was due to financial reasons. What did you make of all this?

It was very strange to be caught up so quickly and directly in the horrors descending from Washington. I had a lot of really conflicted feelings about the idea that it would be there, once he announced that he was the chairman of the Kennedy Center. Because on the one hand, there’s an argument of, “Well, you should hold your ground as much as you can in these cultural spaces, and don’t give them over just because he claims them for himself.”

But at the same time, it’d be very hard to be there with the show and not feel like you’re on some level of complicit in what they’re doing, because you would be in a position where either the show is very successful and then it could be claimed as evidence of how well the Kennedy Center is doing under his leadership — or nobody wants to go because of that, and then what’s the point? There was no winning.

In the end, I guess I’m happy that it worked out the way it did, although it was a very complicated time.

One of the actors who plays the principal of the school in Eureka Day has called you a “Berkeley Chekov.” If Eureka Day wins this Tony, will you agree with him?

That’s the great Bill Irwin, who also has some deep Bay Area roots, who said that. I mean, it’s such an honor to get that compliment from him that I’ll take that as a win.