Can Two Modest Straight Plays Succeed on Broadway? One Should

In a Broadway fall season dominated by musicals, it was nice to see two new straight plays sneak in before the end of the year. Both come from playwrights new to Broadway; both are relatively modest productions without big-name stars (though with several familiar stage vets, including Mare Winningham, Bill Irwin, and Jessica Hecht); and both have won a passel of good reviews. There the resemblance ends.    

Leslye Headland’s Cult of Love takes place in the rural Connecticut childhood home of the Dahl family, whose members — Mom, Dad, four grown children, and their various partners — gather on Christmas Eve for their annual holiday celebration.  In the well-worn tradition of the family-reunion play, strains become evident, secrets are revealed, conflicts erupt — much of them surrounding the family’s traditional Christian faith and values.  

Playwright Headland (who was also co-creator of the TV series Russian Doll) has structured her play with formulaic skill. Each of the three mini-acts (in an intermissionless 1 hour, 40 minutes.) have the right rhythm: the dramatic revelations come at proper intervals, the laughs strategically relieving the tension before the next bombshell, the bustle of overlapping dialogue giving a sense of verisimilitude. Technically, there’s nothing wrong with the play, except that there’s hardly a believable moment in it.

The Dahls don’t seem like a family so much as smorgasbord of hot-button issues, problems, and dysfunctions.  Dad is showing signs of dementia, which some in the family politely ignore. The eldest son is hiding a failing marriage and still trying to justify leaving divinity school to become a lawyer. A gay sister and her new wife are snappishly oversensitive to what they perceive as the family’s homophobia. Another sister has clung to her Christian faith — to the point of borderline psychotic episodes. The fourth sibling is a recovering drug addict, whose belated arrival caps off the first act. 

His entrance, for me, crystallizes the play’s phoniness. Not a hello, or hugs of greeting, or even an introduction of the stranger he has brought with him (a woman who turns out to be his recovery partner). Instead, he instantly bursts out singing, leading the family in an excruciatingly long rendition of the call-and-response Christmas song “Children, Go Where I Send Thee.” The family members, and even the guests, enthusiastically join in, harmonizing perfectly, remembering all the words — ten stanzas worth. The Von Trapp family has got nothing on this crew. 

The frequent singing interludes are a crutch for the playwright, a way of demonstrating the family bond fed by their Christian upbringing. But nowhere else is that bond really apparent: there’s no real warmth or sense of connection, just a lot of resentments and grievances, jammed in with all the subtlety of a blunt-force TV dramedy. The Von Trapps may not have been a more believable family, but at least they got it together to escape the Nazis. 

Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day has a fresher and more promising setting: a progressive private school in Berkeley, Calif., where five parents who serve as the school’s executive board meet regularly to discuss school policy. At first, their talk is an amusing satire of PC sensitivities and silliness, as they earnestly debate how to describe various ethnic categories on the application form for new students. But their spirit of enlightened comity and consensus rapidly breaks down when a crisis emerges: a student has come down with mumps.  

This leads to a bravura scene in which the board chairman hosts a Zoom call with parents, which descends into chaos as the chat comments (displayed as text on stage) grow increasingly vitriolic, revealing the clash between fanatical anti-vaxxers and parents desperate to protect their kids from a wider outbreak.  It’s a definitive send-up of these disembodied, livestream free-for-alls, and one of the funniest things I’ve seen on Broadway in years.

Though Eureka Day was written in 2018 and has had several previous productions, both in the U.S. and in London, its Broadway debut arrives with almost uncanny timing — just as Trump’s cabinet nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has brought the issue of vaccine skepticism back to the fore. The play does a good job of articulating both sides of the fraught vaccine debate, and is admirably even-handed — mocking but not demonizing the impassioned arguments on both sides. 

Unfortunately, as good a job as Spector does of exploring the ideological conflict, he seems at sea on how to resolve it. There are too many extraneous plot threads (two of the board members are having a secret affair, for example) that don’t really lead anywhere, and the play seems to be fishing for an ending. Still, Eureka Day is both a cogent survey and sharp satire of the current “woke” battlefield. Most important, the characters, even when they tend toward types, ring true. Nobody sings a note.