New on Broadway: Eureka Day, Death Becomes Her and Swept Away

From left: Thomas Middleditch, Amber Gray, Bill Irwin, Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz, and Jessica Hecht in Eureka Day. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)

Eureka Day premiered in a production by Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company half a dozen years ago, and it’s finally arrived on Broadway via off-Broadway (in 2019) and London (in 2022). Written by Jonathan Spector and directed by Anna D. Shapiro, it’s a sensationally funny satire of contemporary woke communities – about the impossibility of reaching consensus among progressive people who are trying painfully hard to maintain, or at least convey, sensitivity to each other’s viewpoints when reality seems to have deliquesced into a bog of ferociously held competing opinions. The characters we meet are five members of the board of a private Berkeley elementary school called Eureka Day School who find they have to meet a crisis: a mumps epidemic that divides the parents, some of whom believe in traditional medical practices and some of whom resolutely do not. The school’s middle-aged director is Don, who has a gentle manner and almost bottomless patience but whose demeanor, as Bill Irwin plays him, suggests that his desperation to keep an even keel and indicate respect toward all the other voices in the room has been eating away at him. (He’s like one of Christopher Durang’s befuddled heroes, but without the repressed anger that flares up suddenly every now and then.) Eli (Thomas Middleditch) is a tech billionaire and young father whose generosity has funded the struggling school’s various initiatives, like an all-gender washroom. Eli’s son and the daughter of another board member, Meiko (Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz), are good friends, and their play dates enable the adults to engage in extramarital games of their own; though Eli claims that he and his wife have an open relationship, it turns out that either he’s misrepresented the situation to Meiko or else he and his wife don’t necessarily agree on the rules. The latest addition to the group is Carina (Amber Gray), a Black woman whose perspective, according to the longest-running member, Suzanne (Jessica Hecht), is particularly welcome. Suzanne articulates that view euphemistically, but it comes across as presumptuous and condescending – especially since Carina, like the others, comes from a comfortable middle-class background. But Suzanne is a genius at spurious apologies that sound perfectly sincere, so the colleagues who find her putting words in their mouths tend to trip over themselves when they call her out on it, or come across as more brusque than they’d intended.

These people have all learned the correct rhetoric, but Suzanne speaks it brilliantly, as if she were born to it. In fact, she’s willful and self-serving, and she’s been on the board so long that she’s practically got squatter’s rights. She’s too old to be the parent of a current Eureka student, but she presents her opinions with a protective (masked) maternal assertiveness. In a sense, she even has territorial rights to the school library (where most of the play takes place), since one entire shelf of books that backs their meetings with the force of a memorial wall is filled with books from her own home library that she has passed onto Eureka as a long-term loan. (The section heading above them, SOCIAL JUSTICE, is a marvelous visual joke. So are the Hecht’s expensive-looking post-hippie skirts. Todd Rosenthal designed the set and Clint Ramos the costumes.) The entire cast is excellent – especially Middleditch and Irwin, who uses his mime’s body for witty punctuation. But Jessica Hecht is working on another level entirely, in a role that explores a certain kind of contemporary neurotic self-righteousness that Jodie Foster got at so adeptly in Roman Polanski’s film Carnage. Hecht goes even further than Foster did. If Hecht had come up as an actress in the middle of the twentieth century, when Broadway was still in its golden age, theatregoers would be flocking to whatever show she showed up in the way they once did for Julie Harris or Shirley Booth. Just in the course of the last decade I’ve seen her offer beautiful work on Broadway in Summer, 1976 and the revivals of Fiddler on the Roof and The Price, but her peerless blend of profound Stanislavskian psychological realism and astonishing comic technique in this production is really stunning.

There are no other onstage characters except for Winter (Eboni Flowers), who appears in the brief final scene as the latest board member, but at approximately the midpoint we hear from the parents through their onscreen comments during a Zoom meeting. This is the comic climax of the play, when we see how ferocious and belligerent the members of this community can get in defense of their individual points of view. The crux of the humor in this sequence is the contrast between the board, who have been so achingly sensitive during their interactions but have managed to let their biases filter through the politesse, and the invisible parents, who are feel so justified in their opinions – and are so worked up over the issue – that they have no filters at all. At the same time, Spector prepares the first of two tonal shifts: during the escalating chaos, Eli gets the news that his little boy is seriously ill, but with the merry upstaging of the Zoom insult attacks it’s easy to miss. Fortunately, the next scene, a tête-à-tête between Eli and Meiko, is set in the hospital corridor outside the child’s sick room. Spector handles the shift skillfully. The one that follows, where Suzanne reveals the personal story that determined her stance on vaccination, is more daring dramaturgically, and I can’t imagine how it could work without a master performer like Hecht. She’s a magician.

Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard in Death Becomes Her. (Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

Robert Zemeckis’s savage, audacious 1992 black comedy Death Becomes Her, with a script by Martin Donovan and David Koepp, is both a parody of clichés from romantic novels and romantic melodramas and a wild satire of American narcissism and the desperate longing for eternal youth. It’s about an aging actress named Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep), a has-been who has just opened in an awful musical version of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth – which is also about an aging, narcissistic actress. The night Madeline’s oldest friend, Helen, brings her husband Ernest (Bruce Willis) to see the show, Madeline steals him away when she learns that he’s a distinguished Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who, she hopes, can perform miracles on her. The marriage is a disaster: she takes young lovers, he descends into alcoholism and ends up giving up his career and becoming a mortician, and Helen spends time in a psychiatric hospital, trying to get over her obsession with Madeline. But she comes out of the hospital just as determined to avenge the wrong her old pal has done her. As it happens, both women find the fountain of youth – a potion that freezes youth and sexual desire and cheats death. (In one of the funniest sequences, the purveyor of the potion, played by Isabella Rossellini, hosts a “celebration of spring” party with Andy Warhol, Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe among its undead guests.) Death Becomes Her turns into a burlesque of horror-movie conventions, too, when Ernest throws Madeline down a staircase and breaks her neck and Madeline shoots a hole in Helen’s stomach, yet both ladies survive the assaults.

The new Broadway musical version transfers the deluxe special effects to the stage. More important, it has a pair of stars, Megan Hilty as Madeline and Jennifer Simard as Helen, who are adept at the bitchy vaudeville the material revels in. Hilty, the blond bombshell from the TV series Smash who was so dynamic in the Carol Channing-Marilyn Monroe part in the Encores! production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and the brittle brunette Simard, last seen in the Broadway revival of Company, are a delectable opposites match. It’s like watching Bette Midler collaborate with Christine Baranski. (Christopher Sieber, who played scenes with Simard in Company, was out when I saw the show, replaced by Bud Weber.) The production contains a lot of talent: Derek McLane designed the sets, Paul Tazewell the costumes and Justin Townsend the lighting, and the director-choreographer is Christopher Gattelli. Gattelli does fine work with the dozen gifted ensemble dancers, each of whom gets a deserved individual curtain call. And Marco Pennette’s book and the lyrics by Julia Mattison and Noel Carey are raucous and clever.

The major setbacks are the nondescript music (also by Mattison and Carey) and Michelle Williams, late of Beyoncé’s band Destiny’s Child, who has inherited the Rossellini role. Williams looks great but she sings badly – perhaps this genre of music simply doesn’t suit her – and she can’t act at all. And though most of the show is entertaining, it tends to run down toward the end of each act, despite the verve and fluidity of Gattelli’s staging; I felt somewhat wrung out by the finale. It may just be a matter of taste, and mine for freewheeling comic musicals runs to more modest shows like A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Little Shop of Horrors, the recently revived Once Upon a Mattress and the undervalued Little Me. But the two stars and the dance numbers make it well worth a look

Wayne Duvall and the company of Swept Away. (Photo: Emilio Madrid)

It was surely a foregone conclusion that Swept Away would close early. The big question is how this tale of the 1888 wreck of a whaling ship in which the four surviving sailors, the Captain and the Mate and a pair of brothers, out in the open sea in a lifeboat, turn inevitably to cannibalism, ever found Broadway backers in the first place. When the producers posted the closing notice there was a sudden surge in ticket sales and the show was extended for two more weeks; that’s how I was able to catch it. The Saturday matinee I attended was greeted with the distinctive zeal that attaches to unsuccessful shows on their last legs – I experienced it at Leap of Faith and Bandstand, both of which deserved longer runs, but also at The Times They Are A-Changin’, the jukebox Bob Dylan dance musical choreographed by Twyla Tharp, an unqualified fiasco. Swept Away is an honest piece of work; unhappily, though, it isn’t very good. John Logan’s script doesn’t have the depth or the imagination a narrative this downbeat and quirky demands. And the songs by The Avett Brothers, many of them off Migonette (a concept album about a shipwreck), gives us too much of the same thing, though it contains some haunting ballads.

The book has a frame: the Mate (John Gallagher, Jr.), dying in a tuberculosis ward, is visited by the ghosts of his three companions, who insist that he relate the true story of what happened after the ship went down. The flashback tells us that the younger of the two brothers (Adrian Blake Enscoe) has run away from the family farm in search of adventure; the elder (Stark Sands) has followed him to drag him back home but winds up on the crew. Initially there was an ensemble of sailors around these four actors (the fourth was Wayne Duvall as the Captain), but after the wreck they appeared only infrequently as a kind of spectral chorus. So the musical, directed by Michael Mayer – who worked with Gallagher and Sands on American Idiot, and with Gallagher on Spring Awakening as well – became very intimate, and when the ship upended and the quartet of men in the lifeboat were reflected in its mirrored bottom through squares like prison cells it was quite beautiful to look at. (Rachel Hauck designed the set, which Kevin Adams lit.)

If the musical got to you by the end, as it did to me, that was partly because the narrative is so sad and mostly because of the commitment of the four actors. Gallagher, who’s forty but looks younger, was the reason I was drawn to see Swept Away in the first place. He is, I believe, one of the key performers of his generation. He was terrific in both of his previous musicals with Mayer, though I’d been struck by his fractured sensitivity even earlier, when he played the teenage driver who inadvertently caused the death of Cynthia Nixon’s little boy in Rabbit Hole. (He jumped from that play straight into American Idiot in 2006.) He held his own with Jim Norton and Brian D’Arcy James in Conor McPherson’s triptych drama Port Authority and with Jessica Lange, Gabriel Byrne and Michael Shannon in Long Day’s Journey into Night, though his portrayal of Edmund was, bafflingly, underappreciated by the reviewers, and he was the only one of the quartet who wasn’t nominated for a Tony Award. On TV he has been memorable in The Newsroom and Olive Kitteridge, and on the big screen in Margaret and Short Term 12. In Swept Away, his kinetic energy played vibrantly against the plaintive downbeat of the show. It was a fine performance, especially considering that Logan didn’t seem to have made up his mind about how we’re supposed to read the character of the Mate. Sometimes he’s a kind of Melvillean satanic tempter, sometimes the embodiment of all the evils of nineteenth-century America (in the “Satan Pulls the Strings” number) and occasionally a man of wayward but genuine faith. But as self-sacrificing Big Brother, Stark Sands didn’t have the same kind of obstacle course to navigate, and it was he who provided the musical’s emotional core.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.