I'll admit, I'm not a fan of cringe humor. That's embarrassment humor, where the characters are humiliated for our personal amusement. Its the opposite of Schadenfreude, in which you get a uncomfortably positive feeling about the characters getting their comeuppance. In cringe, the characters don't really feel like they should have things explode on them, and you end up feeling more empathy than vengeance, and share their embarrassment by the very act of watching them suffer.
That said, Eureka Day is cringe, and is pretty good at it.
Eureka Day is a private school in Berkley. We get a seat at the executive board for the school as they continually seek consensus (is not adding a particular racial category on a drop-down menu othering or excluding?). People are heard and valued. Rights are recognized. Decisions must be unanimous. Well-intended liberal values rule the day. Community must be inclusive. Everyone is over-articulate. Buzzwords fly. The granola is crunchy.
Don (Jonathan Slavin) is the feckless principal, who in the words of one of the other members "Is a great captain, until you meet an iceberg." Suzanne (Sara Hennessy) is the queen bee, has been part of the board forever, and is filled to the brim with tragic anecdotes and opinions for the others to recognize. Meiko (Ashley Song) is the quiet knitter who rarely gets to finish a sentence. Eli (Quinn Mattfeld) is an enthusiastic former techbro-turned-stay-at-home father, quick to interrupt, if only pointing out the validity of another's point (Oh, and he's sleeping with Meiko). And Carina (Nemuna Ceesay) is the new girl, trying to fit in and not making too many waves. The dynamics are continual litany of explanations of the validity of each other's opinions that often the result being immobility in decision-making. More self-congratulatory sound than fury.
And then the iceberg hits. Some of the kids come down with mumps, and they have to make the decision about closing the school, for how long, and how to reopen it. They try to handle it by by including everyone in the decision-making process about vaccine requirements, but quickly discover that some are pro-vaccine and some are anti-vaccine. And the peaceable kingdom falls apart.
This most hilarious bit is when the five try to bring all the parents online with a zoom call to discuss the vaccine requirement to reopen the school. It descends into the upper levels of hell quickly and comically in a way that anyone who has been in one of those online group chats can imagine. We can't hear the actors' lines from the laughter as the online discussion is portrayed a screen behind the struggling executive board. But that's OK, because their contribution just makes matters worse. Because this is one of the those problems where consensus and compromise cannot work things out and find middle ground. And it threatens to destroy the school in the process. There is no good solution to make everyone happy.
And there are, in the words of the board itself, "no villains". The characters are broad but broad-based, and have good foundations for their beliefs and good arguments as the larger issues become deeply personal. And while the action builds, they do not get to the point of throwing hands at each other, which happens way too much in this type of comedy (I'm looking at you, God of Carnage after all these years). You like these characters, and you feel for them as they wrestle (and fail) at the challenge. Cringe.
The actors are really good, challenged by the fact that they spend most of their time seated in multi-colored chairs. You're watching them react to each other with facial expressions more than actions. The set design is good, and yeah, I thought the chat log on a big screen behind them actually made sense and worked (a lot of plays incorporating modern tech have a definite problem with that, but the writing here carries it through). And the characters they portray are not horrible people, even we see the moral and ethical ground beneath them leached away by the flood.
As I said at the top, I'm not a fan of cringe. But the team here did a really good job of it, and the writer knew where to stop and provide a ending, if not a happy one. So I'm going to chalk this one up as a win.
More later,
