Eureka Day (Jonathan Spector)
If you never take aim at your own then you’re not a good comedian. Many of us cheer if someone uses wit to tear down the Other Side (whoever that may be,) but the necessary thing that comedy does is make us think about our own contradictions, blindspots, and hypocrisies.
This becomes all the more important as a group becomes homogenized. Homogeneity breeds blindspots and poor thinking. We all have an idea of who the average theater audience is, and it’s not the cross-section of America. So while it is good to have comedic works like The Play the Goes Wrong (which is all for fun,) or Quixote Nuevo (which does a great job of building empathy,) the most necessary comedies, the ones we should celebrate, and the ones I hope Pronoia has a hand in creating, are the ones that look critically at the liberal experience and mindset. It’s why I love Nicky Silver’s The Altruists and it’s why Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day is a great work.
Synopsis
We follow the executive committee of an ultra-liberal private school in San Francisco. It’s a group that prides itself in how inclusive, how thoughtful, and how consensus building it is. Then a mumps outbreak occurs in the significantly non-vaccinated children population and it brings to the fore lots of questions about community vs individualism and what is safety, tolerance, and respect.
One of the chief conflicts is between the board president who is a founding family of the school and a new parent with New Ideas.
As a Producer
Jonathan Spector must have given himself a high-five at his good timing while the Covid-pandemic was happening. Eureka Day was first performed in 2018, and manages to crystalize an attitude before it disappeared forever. It’s easy to forget that before Covid the most vocal anti-vaccine community were highly liberal folks in the bay area, and Eureka Day manages to predict almost every conversation that happened around public health in the last two years, but with the politics ostensibly reversed. To me, this is a great way of reminding everyone that our views are assailable and that our opinions can change wildly based on non-evidence based thinking. It’s a wonderful, accidental monument to human foibles.
On top of that the play is hysterically funny with well drawn characters. I have enough faith in the audience to be able to engage in the satire without taking offense at it, and as long as they can do that I think the play should find a welcome home in any city.
Much like Deer this is exactly the sort of play Pronoia would produce, all the more so because the social themes are more relevant to what I want to create than the bizarreness of Deer, but the cast is mostly older (mid 40s to 50s) than the artists we work with currently.
As a Designer
The play is straightforward, refreshingly taking place in one location, the school library, but showcasing effective transformation over time. It features functional projection for a livestream scene, which is a welcome challenge, and there should be enough room within the tone of the play for almost every department to creatively express themselves.
As a Writer
This is exactly the kind of show I want to write: it’s bracing, funny, and satirical. It doesn’t back down from the sort of people who are going to watch it, and it shows characterization subtly and through well-executed moments. The ending is a little abrupt, but otherwise this is the precise sort of work I want to do, and which I think I’ve failed to do in the past (through many unperformed sketches, and even the more clumsy pieces like Basically Apartheid and Ally Theater from Violence is the Best Medicine.)
The Exonerated (Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen)
A true-crime play from the Bush Administration that packs a punch but also has humor? The Exonerated hits a lot of useful buzzwords. My copy of the play appears to come from Lafayette, Indiana, which almost certainly means that it belonged to Steven Saltsman, who probably played the character of Kerry (by what’s highlighted in the script.)
As a Producer
This is a powerful piece about six real people who found their death sentences overturned based on new evidence. One of them is a Stage-Manageresque character who shepherds us along as we learn about how they found themselves on the wrong end of the law, how it broke them down, their time in prison, and their eventual return to society.
Perhaps understandably the play focuses more on how they got to jail than what they did once they were in it or much of what happened to them when they got out. The stories are portrayed unflinchingly and each of our six narrators sounds interesting and distinct with moments of earned-humor and crushing sadness and anger.
It’s the opposite of a cozy read, but it serves much the same purpose: spend time with these people and breathe in their stories. It isn’t an activist piece: it’s not trying to inspire you to anger, but it certainly will sit with me for a little while.
This isn’t a play Pronoia would do, however (at least not as we understand it now.) For better or for worse it’s just not funny enough.
As a Designer
My favorite cocktails are invariable three-ingredient ones: there is nothing to high behind and everything has a clear purpose in strengthening the whole of the drink. That’s what I think of any design for The Exonerated: it doesn’t want much, but everything you have and do needs to be carefully calibrated. I see a lot of stark light and simple fades, the costumes should be specific, but uncomplicated.
As a Writer
This isn’t the sort of play that I immediately gravitate to and it’s presentational style means that there is little to take from it. It’s excellently done, but I’m unlikely to pursue documentary theater anytime soon, and even if I wrote something parodying the form (such as Carlos Murillo’s Human Interest Story) I’ve read enough examples in my life that this didn’t introduce anything new.
Deer (Aaron Mark)
One thing we don’t talk about much is the art we consume and how that changes the art we produce. On top of that, I’ve got a giant stack of unread plays and books that I’d really like to get around to reading, so let’s see how long we can go, huh?
I’m starting the year off on a decidedly weird note with Aaron Marks’ Deer, a play nominally about people being pushed to the breaking point, and also about a dead deer.
As a Producer/Audience Member
We’re following an older couple, finally free of all responsibilities (their daughter has finally moved out, Cynthia’s live-in mother recently died.) They’re driving out to their home in the Poconos when Cynthia hits a deer.
Things go squirrelly when Cynthia refuses to believe that the deer is dead and insists they nurse it back to health. In short order we find that Cynthia is extraordinarily resentful of her life and the people in it, while Ken appears to not know what he really wants, but is willing to go to extreme lengths (and keep major secrets) to get it.
It’s a disturbing play, not entirely grounded in reality, but I found myself drawn to the characters nonetheless. It has the edge of unrealness that a Peter Sinn Nachtrieb play usually does, but not necessarily with the same heart.
The tone and shape of the play, darkly comedic and devoted to following things to their logical conclusion, is in keeping with my style and is definitely the kind of play Pronoia would do, however the ages of the characters (50’s) and the complexity of the production (explored in the next section) prevent it from being something that we could realistically pursue.
In terms of companies I’ve seen, it fits in most with a Catastrophic production, though is perhaps too comprehensible. I’d love to see a production of this play if it ever makes its way to me.
As a Designer
Deer has one enormous responsibility and gift: the Deer itself, and the mess it creates. This character/prop needs to appear suddenly (to get hit,) ooze blood, be portable by the actors, be capable of being chopped up, and (presumably) be able to be reassembled for tomorrow’s performance.
This is an exciting challenge, though not one I would know immediately how to budget for or begin to approach. Considering the blood and dirt of this production Costumes and Scenery have their work cut out for them: everything needs to be able to be cleaned constantly and chances are you’d want to hide some squibs in the set itself so the deer doesn’t have to do all the blood work.
Any production would also need to decide whether it would want lights and sound to help shape the unreal moments. There’s a lot of opportunity in this play for anyone who wants to tackle it.
As a Writer
It’s no secret that I want people to produce what I write, so it helps to take lessons from what has been produced and published. What can I learn from Deer?
It has a clear hook, the Deer, that is easily imagined and explained to people (both prospective producers and in marketing.)
It is not afraid to be completely what it is, I didn’t talk about the end of the play in any great detail, but the Deer starts talking about a third of the way through the play, and it only keeps doubling down on the weirdness from there.
Most notably it’s not afraid to let the characters be embarrassing or to let their actions speak for themselves. They do things that are fundamentally strange and outside the bounds of what we’d expect characters to do, but they’ve been human enough to that point that as a reader I went along with it, and I think an actor could find a way to make those moments work without losing the audience.
Like I said, it is tonally similar to what I already write, and I probably could be served well by thinking of dominant imagery in my work such as what happens in Deer.
Legitimacy: 1976 v 2004
Sometimes in electoral politics what dominates a campaign is not a candidate or a set of issues, but the infrastructure of our government itself. We take a look at two high-watermark elections for third-party candidates, 1976 and 2004, why they were so contentious, why despite attracting many candidates that didn't translate into votes, and who legitimacy favors.
Send retractions to contact@pronoiatheater.com
Support the show at paypal.me/pronoiatheater or venmo: @pronoia
Upset: Hale v Democrats
Our newest episode is taking a little longer so have this short story about America's first anti-slavery senator and failed presidential candidate John Parker Hale!
Support the show at paypal.me/pronoiatheater or venmo: @Pronoia