Over the past seven years, Bay Area actor Lisa Anne Porter has gained a deep appreciation for her character Suzanne, the founder of a fictional private school in Berkeley and a mother of six who refuses to vaccinate her kids.
“I have enormous sympathy for someone who feels like the rest of the world looks at her like she’s crazy, and that she doesn’t have intelligence and integrity,” Porter said as she rehearsed to reprise her role in Eureka Day at Mill Valley’s Marin Theatre. “Living with it for so long, there are other aspects of her that are really coming forward as to why she’s so triggered by what happens in the room. Certainly COVID and Black Lives Matter.”
Eureka Day first premiered in 2018 at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre, which is co-producing the play’s return to the Bay Area just a few months after it won a Tony Award, going to playwright Jonathan Spector, for Best Revival. The play’s homecoming, which begins previews Thursday, Aug. 28, welcomes back Porter and many other members of the original Berkeley cast. Josh Costello, Aurora’s artistic director who directed the 2018 world premiere, returns to helm this production.
“The fact is that vaccines are safe and effective, and the play gives voice to somebody who is living in a different set of reality with a different set of facts, based on information that is false,” Costello said. “Yet the play does a really remarkable job of humanizing that character.”
The prescience of Eureka Day, a satire about vaccine hesitancy at an elite Berkeley private school, partly explains the show’s wide appeal and successful global run. Spector sought to tell a story about people learning to come together despite their fundamentally different views. Meanwhile, the issue of vaccine politics has gained more poignancy, following the COVID-19 pandemic and the “Make America Healthy Again” movement.
