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by Jonathan Spector, directed by Mitchell Cushman

Coal Mine Theatre, 2076 Danforth Avenue, Toronto

February 5–March 1, 2026

Meiko: “I believe in human fallibility”

Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day is quite a surprising play. Its discussions of contagious disease, quarantines and anti-vaxxers would make you think it had been recently written. In fact, it had its world premiere in Berkeley, California, in April 2018 before anyone had heard of anything called coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 spreading in Wuhan, China. Yet, when there is a mumps breakout in the small Eureka Day School in Berkeley of the play, the reactions of the five-member of the Executive Board in charge of the school foreshadow exactly the kind of arguments and counterarguments we would later hear around the globe. Now that our neighbour to the South has turned against all vaccinations, the play has strangely become even more relevant. Eureka Day is a blisteringly funny satire of wokeness, albeit with a sting in its tail, perfectly acted by a tight ensemble under Mitchell Cushman’s incisive direction.

When you enter the Coal Mine Theatre your eyes are treated to what must be the most meticulously detailed, naturalistic set the Coal Mine has ever constructed. Steve Lucas and Beckie Morris have given us a marvellous replica of a library at a school for very young children. The size of the chairs and the height of the colourful table tell us that. Rather odd, though is the fact that the library has sections for fiction, non-fiction and social justice. Also, the alphabet chart that runs from the library along one wall to the back of the auditorium includes such mnemonics as “B is for Boycott”, “F is for Feminist” and “L is for LGBTQ+”.

If we wonder what kind of school this is, we find out in the first scene. There we meet the Executive Board at the end of what seems like a long hashing out of what should or should not be included in the drop-down menu of ethnicities that prospective parents can use to identify themselves when applying to the private school. The wording of the menu is important because Eureka Day School prides itself on its inclusivity. Use of politically correct language is rigorously enforced, especially by Suzanne, one of the founding members of the school. Modish phrases such as “holding space”, “triggering” and “othering” pepper the language of the four regular Board-members. The Board has a policy of keeping one of its five seats open for the parent of a new pupil at the school, and she, Carina, understands this kind of speech but doesn’t use it because she seems to note the virtue signalling attached to it.

The crisis comes early when the county Department of Health announces that there has been an outbreak of mumps and mandates that all students at the school must show proof of vaccination to attend and those with the disease must be quarantined at home until they are no longer contagious. The statement causes turmoil for a school so dedicated to diversity and inclusion because at its very basis are uniformity and exclusion. How the Board tries to cope with this dilemma makes up the majority of the action which delineates how the threads that bind the community of the school together begin to unravel.

The high point of the play, and its funniest scene, occurs after the Department of Health has shut down the school and the Board holds a Zoom town hall with all the parents to decide what to do. As Don, the head of the Board, tries to present the situation in the calmest possible terms, the comments from parents on the display screen on stage become increasingly insulting and inflammatory. Someone calls the first child with mumps at the school “Patient Zero” and someone else notes when someone makes the first Nazi reference. The Board’s shocked reactions, Don’s vain attempts to back-peddle and the torrent of abuse in the comments leads to one of the funniest depictions of chaos on stage in recent times.

It is in this scene that we realize that Spector is satirizing something much deeper that wokeness or political correctness. Spector shows that the presence of mumps, an indisputably real fact, is something that the utopian world of the Board, who promote fairness and justice, simply cannot deal with. The Board can’t cope with the intrusion of reality into the artificially “safe” bubble they have created. The Zoom town hall goes further in demonstrating that the Board also cannot cope with people who are not bound by their rituals of performative politeness, people who turn out to be many of the parents of children at the school. Spector’s play is thus about nothing less than the conflict between realism and idealism.

Spector demonstrates that this conflict is present even among members of the Board. In a not fully developed subplot, Eli and his wife Rebecca (whom we never see) have supposedly move “beyond matrimony” and have an open marriage, leading Eli to have a guilt-free affair with fellow Board member Meiko Yet Eli feels he has to plan all his encounters with Meiko when Rebecca is away. Worse, Rebecca’s texts to Meiko show that Rebecca is far from as cool with Eli’s affair as Eli claims she is. Eli and Meiko deal with the reality of Rebacca’s negative responses in opposite ways – Eli denies them, Meiko is mortified by them.

As far as the main topic of vaccination is concerned, battle lines are soon drawn between Suzanne, who is an ardent anti-vaxxer, and Carina, who believes protecting the entire community of the school is more important than the choice of one parent. Given that the play was written before Covid, it is surprising and distressing to hear Suzanne make the same arguments against vaccines that one heard during the pandemic and that one hears from the current US Secretary of Health today.

Under Mitchell Cushman’s taut direction, the ensemble gives impressive true-to-life performances. Perhaps the most delightful of these is Kevin Bundy’s performance as the Board chair, Don. Those who have seen Bundy at Stratford, the Shaw and Soulpepper will know that he has a special gift for comedy. Eureka Day provides a wonderful showcase for his portrayal of Don as an inherently kind but quite clearly weak group leader who quickly is out of his depth when any dispute between Board members erupts. In the Zoom scene Bundy is hilarious in showing how Don’s optimism is pummeled into the ground with each successive blow from a negative comment.

It is a real treat to see Sarah McVie on stage again after her Cordelia opposite Christopher Plummer in his King Lear at Stratford in 2002. McVie brings out all the hypocrisy in Suzanne, who is the self-appointed tone policeperson and woke enforcer of the group. Using her most soothing voice, McVie’s Suzanne never hesitates to correct speakers when they happen to tread outside her perceived boundaries of inclusive language and thought. What is so comically irritating is how McVie also manages to lend her advice an undercurrent of opprobrium that shores up her own position even as she claims to be speaking for the good of all.

Jake Epstein and Stephanie Sy play the secretly adulterous couple of Eli and Meiko. Epstein is very funny as the slightly dim-witted Eli, who seems generally unaware of both what the Board is discussing and what is happening in his own private life. Spector allows the character a great turnaround when Eli’s son comes down with mumps and has to go to hospital. Then Epstein disturbingly mutates Eli’s denseness into frightened confusion and an unattractive willingness to find someone to blame for his fear.

Sy’s character Meiko tends to follow along with whatever the majority decides in an attempt to keep a low profile. Sy is expert in revealing Meiko’s thought more through what Meiko doesn’t that what she does say. Meiko’s silences and the energy she puts into her knitting reflect the varying levels of tension in the room. Sy’s silence after a confrontation with Eli is especially noticeable. Suddenly Sy has Meiko explode in an extended, semi-deranged outburst in which Meiko wildly denounces the untrustworthiness of science, a speech that can be read as expressing her disgust with all the untrustworthiness she has encountered with Eli and the group.

As the newcomer to the Board, Sophia Walker’s Corina, the only Black member of the Board, has an outsider’s perspective. It turns out that Corina is the only one in the group who puts logic and reason ahead of mindless conforming to artificial rules. Corina has chosen Eureka Day for her son because of its policy of inclusion. Yet, in the various scenes of meetings it becomes clear that the others can’t help looking down on her even as they claim to welcome her. Walker communicates Corina’s response to the others first through posture and facial expressions long before Corina ever says anything about this out loud.

One of the remarkable aspects of Eureka Day’s being written before the pandemic is that it shows that Spector already perceived the fault lines that existed not just between left and right in American society but within the left itself. Spector suggests through the microcosm of Eureka Day’s Board that the utopia that those on the left hope to impose on its adherents is bound to collapse with the slightest touch of reality from outside the bubble it has built for itself. From the perspective of 2026, even as we laugh at the folly of the characters’ idealism and their descent into division, we also see a glimpse of how helpless this group will be when faced with a force maliciously intent on destroying everything it believes in.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Sophia Walker as Corina, Stephanie Sy as Meiko, Sarah McVie as Suzanne and Kevin Bundy as Don; Kevin Bundy as Don, Jake Epstein as Eli, Stephanie Sy as Meiko and Sarah McVie as Suzanne; Kevin Bundy as Don; Sophia Walker as Corina. © 2026 Elana Emer.

For tickets visit: www.coalminetheatre.com.