Battle lines are drawn in 'Eureka Day'

This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on November 11, 2025. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.

by Lawrence Toppman

The official American motto is “E pluribus unum:” “Out of many, one,” a republic born of a shared feeling of community.

The unofficial motto is “I’ll do anything I damn please, because my opinion is every bit as valid as yours.”

These points of view meet with combustible results in “Eureka Day.” Jonathan Spector’s play has had an up-and-down 2025: It ended a well-received Broadway run, had its appearance at the Kennedy Center canceled after President Trump took over the board — I think you’ll see why in a moment — and then won the Tony Award for best revival.

Now, Three Bone Theatre gives it a local premiere in which comedy, angst and a startling moment of tragedy combine seamlessly.

If you emphasize the second word, the title becomes the name of a private day school run in expectation of perfect harmony. Emphasizing the first word suggests a day when everyone gets a wake-up call from reality: We can’t all get what we want all the time. In America, though, them’s fightin’ words.

We begin with an awkwardly funny scene of schmoozy wokeness, an attempt to set up a drop-down menu in an online application form that covers every human being on the planet. Because the school’s charter says all decisions must be made unanimously by the executive board, that quintet bandies words until it reaches a clumsy consensus.

At the next session, they hit bumps they can’t rise over: A child has been diagnosed with mumps, and a public health official decrees that only vaccinated students may return to school. Now, battle lines get drawn.

Suzanne (Donna Scott), motivated by an incident in her own life, insists parental choice should be taken into account. Stay-at-home dad Eli (Brandon Dawson) wants mainly to avoid conflict, until his son gets laid low by the disease. Conflict-averse principal Don (Rob Addison) flutters back and forth anxiously, soothing egos. Meiko (Amy Wada) mostly sticks to her knitting but occasionally has a trenchant comment. New member Carina (Vanessa Robinson) believes science trumps unfounded anti-vaxxer rhetoric.

So natural are the performances and Tonya Bludsworth’s direction that I forgot I was watching performers who are mostly familiar to me. Scott, especially, made a troubled, kindly and complex character out of someone who would be easy (yet unfair) to write off as a conspiracy theory-driven crank. Whether she’s wrong in her views about everyone in the vast medical establishment suppressing the danger of vaccines — and playwright Spector thinks she is — she holds those views for a reason. We end up empathizing, if not agreeing, with her.

What makes the characters’ behavior infuriatingly funny is how hard they struggle to reconcile irreconcilable views. Don can’t tell anti-vaxxers to take kids elsewhere, because a withdrawal of two dozen families might cause an over-extended budget to collapse. (Converting all bathrooms to unisex facilities has been disastrously expensive.) Nor can he afford to lose families with the opposing point of view.

So, he and the board cling to the fantasy that both American dreams — complete solidarity and complete independence — can co-exist. That way, madness almost lies, until common sense forces the group toward an inevitable, if uncomfortable, choice.

The funniest scene came when Don opened a meeting online, so parents could weigh in on vaccine policy. I couldn’t decide whether to listen to the helpless utterances of the characters in front of me or read the pop-up comments on the screen behind them, which descended from polite disagreement to bitter insults, wonky comments and childish name-calling. Maybe our real national motto ought to be “E pluribus, garrulitas:” “Out of many, babble.”

Three Bone Theatre’s production of “Eureka Day” runs through Nov. 23 at The Arts Factory, 1545 W. Trade St. Performances are at 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday, with a community talkback on Nov. 16. (Let’s hope it’s more civil than the one in the play.)

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Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.

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