Jonathan Spector’s 2025 Tony Award-winning Eureka Day, with its sharp humor and painfully familiar questions about privilege, progressivism and public health, has found a lively and incisive staging in Iowa City. Under the direction of Kathleen Johnson, Riverside Theatre’s production embraces the play’s contradictions with a mix of warmth and unease — a balance that, if occasionally uneven, feels entirely appropriate for a work about well-intentioned parents talking past each other.
From the moment the audience enters, Johnson’s world is impeccably realized. The set, designed with immaculate precision, perfectly evokes the private elementary school meeting room where the following chaos and drama unfolds. Every book on display, colorful children’s chair and comically familiar signage speaks to the micro-utopian aspirations of progressive education — and to the fragility of that vision once conflict arises. It’s a space so vividly rendered that one almost expects a bake sale of artisan scones to break out during intermission.
If the lights don’t quite match the wit of the set, they at least gesture toward the metaphysical. The design occasionally literalizes the play’s emotional beats — a colored wash to underscore sincerity, or a stark shift to another to depict alienation — but this on-the-nose quality may be less a flaw than a reflection of Eureka Day’s own blunt earnestness.
The ensemble is uniformly strong, navigating Spector’s rapid-fire dialogue with a magnetism that allows one to engage with the characters’ opinions with an open mind, even if some lines out of context would make one shudder. As Suzanne, actor Robyn Calhoun authentically radiates both maternal warmth and ethical panic. Joshua Fryvecind’s Don captures the well-meaning ineffectuality of consensus-driven leadership, while Janette Luu’s Meiko finds quiet intensity in her growing disillusionment. Aaron Stonerook’s Eli and Enjoli Valentine’s Carina bring an electric tension to the group dynamic with all cast members, dispensing humor through the gathering storm.
If this production errs at all, it is in its eagerness to mine laughs from Spector’s dialogue. Eureka Day is, of course, a very funny play — and this cast under Johnson’s direction has impeccable timing — but some of the more biting exchanges risk softening into sketch comedy. Yet even this tendency feels dramaturgically defensible: These are, after all, people desperate to keep things “light,” to avoid discomfort at any cost. When the laughter falters the effect is all the more jarring.
Costume design cleverly situates these characters within a recognizable social milieu: the granola bourgeoisie, dressed in sustainable fabrics and discreetly expensive basics. The props, however, add a note of irony — the metal knitting needles, the Amazon-type travel mugs — hinting at the contradictions of a class that preaches ethics while living in convenience.
At the heart of Johnson’s staging are a series of deeply human questions: What happens when good intentions collide and conflict? Can empathy survive when our values are at odds? Those questions echo throughout the evening. The production doesn’t offer answers — nor should it. Instead, it invites the audience to sit in the discomfort, to laugh, cringe and perhaps recognize themselves in the fumbling attempts at consensus.
In the end, this Eureka Day succeeds not because it tidily resolves its conflicts, but because it trusts its audience to live with them. The result is a production that’s as funny as it is unsettling — a portrait of a community that could easily be our own.
Riverside Theatre’s production of Eureka Day continues through Nov. 9
