“Eureka Day,” October 24 through November 9

Friday, October 24, through Sunday, November 9

Riverside Theatre, 119 East College Street, Iowa City IA

A 2025 Tony Award winner hailed by the New York Times as "the perfect play for our age of disagreement," Jonathan Specter's hilarious, biting comedy Eureka Day enjoys an October 24 through November 9 run at Iowa City's Riverside Theatre, the work also lauded by The New Yorker as "so brilliantly yoked to the current American moment – its flighty politics, its deadly folly – that it makes you want to jump out of your skin."

In this recipient of this year's Tony for Best Revival of a Play, the Eureka Day School in Berkeley, California, is a bastion of progressive ideals: representation, acceptance, social justice. In weekly meetings, Eureka Day’s five board members develop and update policy to preserve this culture of inclusivity, reaching decisions only by consensus. But when a mumps outbreak threatens the Eureka community, facts become subjective and every solution divisive, leaving the school’s leadership to confront the central question of our time: How do you build consensus when no one can agree on truth? With Spector's play the recipient of rave reviews for its Broadway revival, Time Out New York stated that his comedy "extract[s] comic gold from the little tugs-of-war for control among the members of the committee. But ... this comedy of manners yields to a serious probing of interpersonal responsibility and the limits of consideration. Even as it stakes out a moral position on its subject, Eureka Day avoids the kind of lording dismissal that, in too much of our social-media lives, has become epidemic.”

Serving as Eureka Day's director is Kathleen Johnson, whose previous credits for Riverside include Romeo & Juliet, A Walk in the Woods, and It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play. With Kelly Garrett acting as stage manager, additional members of Johnson's creative team include: assistant stage manager Jackie McCall; scenic designer Tyler Salow; costume designer Marc Marcos; lighting designer Haven Haywood; sound designer Jason “Blue” Herbert; props designer Stephen Polchert; intimacy coordinator Carrie Pozdol; and board operator Hannah Green. Six gifted actors, meanwhile, compose the Eureka Day ensemble: Robyn Calhoun; Joshua Fryvecind; Janette Luu; Enjoli Valentine; Marc Marcos; and Aaron Stonebrook, who appears through the courtesy of Actors’ Equity Association, the United States' union of professional actors and stage managers.

Eureka Day runs in Iowa City from October 24 through November 9, with performances Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. On Saturday the 25th, there will be a Public Health Community Panel Talkback exploring the play’s themes of vaccination, trust, and collective responsibility, with Dr. Maurine Neiman, Dr. Aaron Scherer, Karrey Shannon, and Dr. Peter Wallace discussing how public-health decisions shape and reflect our communities. There will also be a talkback with the performers and director hosted by Miriam Gilbert following the afternoon performance on Sunday, October 26. Both events are free and open to the public, and you do not need to attend the performances to attend the talkbacks.

Admission is $18-42, and more information and tickets are available by calling (319)259-7099 and visiting RiversideTheatre.org.