Bay Area theater that premiered Oakland artist’s Broadway-bound play now facing fundraising emergency

When you’re an Oakland playwright penning a commission about Berkeley for a 150-seat Berkeley nonprofit theater, you don’t expect your script to wind up on Broadway.

But six years after Aurora Theatre Company mounted the taut, laugh-till-you-hyperventilate “Eureka Day,” about a measles outbreak at an ultraliberal Berkeley private school where some parents are anti-vaxxers, Jonathan Spector’s script is heading to Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre this fall, under the auspices of Manhattan Theatre Club. Tony Award winner Anna D. Shapiro, recently the artistic director of Steppenwolf Theatre Company, directs, with previews beginning Nov. 25. 

“I could never have imagined that this play would change my life in the way that it has,” Spector, 44, told the Chronicle in advance of the MTC’s Thursday, April 1, announcement. 

The news comes as Aurora needs to raise $500,000 in order to have another season, Artistic Director Josh Costello, who directed the world premiere of “Eureka Day,” confirmed with the Chronicle. 

• Review: Aurora’s ‘Eureka Day’ goes from ‘so Berkeley’ to universal

“We’re in a tight financial spot right now — probably the tightest spot we’ve ever been in,” he said, citing the long tail of the pandemic.

Costello was nonetheless brimming with joy for Spector, calling the Broadway news the “best possible outcome” for the company’s Originate + Generate program, which commissioned the play. “Aurora has developed and created a play that has gone on to be part of the national and international conversation,” he said.

The irony that such good and bad news could strike one company simultaneously is emblematic of the state of Bay Area theater’s pandemic recovery. The industry’s ecosystem depends on small and midsize companies such as Aurora to identify and incubate talent, and Aurora reliably produces sizzling work — “Paradise Blue,” “Born With Teeth,” “Hurricane Diane” — where every seat is ringside. Yet, since the pandemic walloped the long tenuous financial model of the regional theater movement, no one has come up with another funding structure to take its place.

Costello told a story that’s become familiar in an era when many theaters have either closed or squeaked by on emergency fundraising campaigns. Subscriber numbers have been stuck at half their pre-pandemic levels, he said, and expenses are up because of inflation and AB5, the so-called gig work bill that made it harder to classify workers as independent contractors, among other reasons. 

One-time pandemic support, such as the federal government’s Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, only delayed a financial reckoning without creating a path toward long-term sustainability.

Aurora has been running on a deficit budget since 2020, spending down its savings. “Now we’re at the point where we can’t have another deficit,” he said. 

But amid these challenges, Spector’s achievement is cause for celebration. It’s incredibly rare for a script by a current Bay Area resident — and one that premiered in and chronicles the region — to make it to the nation’s most famous theater district. The closest comparison might be Green Day’s “American Idiot,” which premiered at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2009, though that show is set in a faceless suburb and had Broadway aspirations from the beginning.

By contrast, Spector said, “I knew nothing about commercial theater.” 

To explain how unusual the path of “Eureka Day” is, Costello cited a truism he attributed to Cutting Ball Theater co-founder Rob Melrose: “In the Bay area, the difference between a hit and a show that’s a disappointment is that the hit extends for a week, maybe two weeks. That’s the only difference.” Costello added, “There’s no path beyond that.” The season model, by which a company tightly schedules its venue for a whole year all at once, allows little flexibility.

After the show’s spectacular premiere here, which garnered it the prestigious Will Glickman Award honoring the Bay Area’s best new play, Brooklyn company Colt Coeur produced “Eureka Day” off-Broadway, and in 2022, London’s Old Vic presented it in the West End, with Helen Hunt in the cast.

Spector said he’s been in talks to take the show to Broadway since 2019, but COVID both stalled progress and shifted how audiences receive the play. 

Before the pandemic, he said, audiences could read the play as about vaccines and “society and democracy and how you make decisions collectively, in a time of a lack of any agreed-upon trustworthy information in the world.” Then, he went on, “early in COVID, I feel like it was impossible to see it as anything except about COVID.” Now he hopes enough time has passed that audiences can interpret the show through both lenses.

“Eureka Day” achieves the extraordinary balance of not ridiculing its anti-vax parent character, Suzanne, while also not validating or apologizing for her quackery. Spector makes Suzanne sympathetic before he reveals her politics, which makes it impossible — for either the other characters or the audience — to dismiss her outright.

At the same time, the show is outrageously funny. In one particularly masterful scene, the school’s executive committee tries to host a Facebook Live about the measles outbreak only to get overtaken by the nasty comments that pour in, communicated via notification pings and digital projections of their text bubbles. 

Costello still vividly recalls the first time a preview audience witnessed that scene. “It was nonstop five minutes of roaring laughter where you couldn’t hear any of the dialogue. Jonathan and I looked at each other and were like, ‘What is happening?’ 

“We had to make it less funny,” he added, with a laugh. “We had to put pauses in so that you could hear a couple of key bits of dialogue.”

Much of the other humor comes from how exquisitely Berkeley the characters are. The executive committee makes decisions only by consensus, and the head of school affirms each parent’s voice by taking 10 seconds to make silent eye contact with them, one by one. The evolved white male on the committee says things like, “I was starting to feel very self-conscious about how prevalent my voice was.”

Spector said different productions — there have been about 10 — have leaned into the Berkeleyness to different degrees. On Broadway, he said, “I’m excited to put Berkeley onstage for a lot of people.” 

The journey of “Eureka Day” to Broadway can be a tool in Aurora’s fundraising efforts, Costello said, showing donors what happens when you invest in new plays — how even the nation’s most august stages rely on nimbler companies for the art form’s research and development. 

“There will be some national attention on us, which will help us in terms of getting the rights to new plays,” Costello said. “People will say, ‘Oh, that’s the theater that did “Eureka Day.” Maybe I do want my play to be produced there, even though they’re small.’ ”

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story misrepresented a quotation attributed to Rob Melrose.

Reach Lily Janiak: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com