Waiting for the Eureka moment in Eureka Day

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• Title: Eureka Day
• Written by: Jonathan Spector
• Director: Mitchell Cushman
• Actors: Kevin Bundy, Jake Epstein, Sarah McVie, Stephanie Sy, Sophia Walker
• Company: Coal Mine Theatre
• Venue: Coal Mine Theatre
• City: Toronto
• Year: until February 22

Satire is finicky. It often walks a fine line between stereotyping and sermonizing, somehow finding good jokes along that border. The best satire can ambush us just as we reach peak smugness, offering flashes of enlightenment that redirect our laughter – frequently back onto ourselves.

I didn’t experience any of those eureka-type moments watching Eureka Day at Coal Mine Theatre last week, but I have been thinking about Jonathan Spector’s play since leaving the subterranean production in Toronto’s east end.

I can’t add my voice to the chorus of praise it has received across the U.S., which has hailed it as a hilarious satire of liberal parenting and landing it last year’s Tony Award for best revival. Yes, there are some very funny moments in this play about a mumps outbreak at an ostensibly progressive private school in Berkeley, California. But the thrust of the comedy consists of lampooning wokeness, which feels a bit like yesterday’s joke.

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The play, which premiered in 2018, does exist in a kind of perpetual yesterday. In a pre-COVID world, the debate about vaccines was neither partisan nor ideological. Not vaccinating your child didn’t mean you voted for Trump. (When I was growing up in 1980s Toronto, the non-immunized kids mostly came from anti-establishment hippie families). So, in Spector’s setup, the debate about vaccine mandates erupts among otherwise like-minded parents who all pay enormous tuition to send their kids to Eureka Day, a school where pronouns are gender-neutral and “social justice” has its own library section.

The play is set in that library (designed by Steve Lucas and Beckie Morris), a cheerful room overlooking the schoolyard, its walls plastered with enlightened alphabet posters (D is for decolonization, etc.). The plot unfolds through a series of parents’ committee meetings, chaired by the principal, Don (Kevin Bundy), an unflappable, avuncular guy who likes to quote Rumi. At the first meeting, the parents welcome newcomer Carina (Sophia Walker), a gay mom who has just moved to the community, then proceed to debate whether “transracial adoptee” should be included in the drop-down menu of the school’s admission form.

When a letter from public health informs them of a mumps case within the student body, the characters reveal where they stand on vaccines. It’s here where the satire leans into stereotypes. The anti-vaxxers, Suzanne (Sarah McVie) and Meiko (Stephanie Sy) are both decidedly unlikeable – the former strident and hypocritical, the latter mostly just ditzy. The skeptics, Don and Eli (Jake Epstein) are meek and annoying. Only Carina, who believes in the importance of vaccine mandates, is rational, thoughtful and capable of speaking like a normal human being. For an audience of Toronto theatregoers, she is our proud avatar on stage.

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We come to satire wanting to laugh, and director Mitchell Cushman, known for his richly imaginative productions, doesn’t skimp on the chuckles. The heartiest come from a scene in which the committee hosts an online meeting open to all parents, and the group chat devolves into something so ugly, vituperative and vulgar that it makes schoolyard bullying look comparatively mature. The vitriol will be all too familiar for anyone who dipped their toes into an online COVID-era debate about mandates, school closures or protests.

But when the satire is about a polemical issue that feels just about intractable these days, and speaks to the larger polarization of our contemporary world, surely we want more than a brief laugh. We want to have some aspect of our thinking on the topic challenged or deepened or refined. We want the tiniest eureka, right?

That is where the play falls short. During its 100-odd minutes, I heard nothing I hadn’t heard before. The arguments were as predictable as the characters who voiced them; not a single idea gave me pause.

Spector’s coup is to demonstrate that the anti-vaxxers dogma isn’t just contrarian hot air, but the upshot of real – in this case, tragic – lived experience. Eureka? I shudder for the audience member who had never before considered that their ideological opponent is also a human being.