Jonathan Spector’s sharp comedy about a school community divided by a mumps outbreak arrives in Singapore with questions that feel particularly familiar after the pandemic. Director Daniel Jenkins and cast members Julie Wee and Munah Bagharib discuss the play’s uneasy balance of humour and heart, the people behind its competing convictions, and why finding common ground can be harder than it sounds.

What happens when a group of well-meaning people, all convinced they are acting in the best interests of their community, find themselves unable to agree on what to do? That is the predicament at the centre of Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day, a comedy set in an affluent, progressive school community in California. When a mumps outbreak forces the school’s board to confront questions surrounding vaccination, the parents and educators find themselves negotiating not only a public health crisis, but also their own deeply held beliefs, personal anxieties and competing ideas of what it means to do the right thing.

The premise might sound familiar to anyone who has lived through the COVID-19 pandemic. But Eureka Day is not simply a play about vaccines, nor is its central conflict a straightforward contest between those who are right and those who are wrong. Its characters are more complicated than that. They are people who believe they are being reasonable, who want to protect their children and preserve their community, and who discover that good intentions do not necessarily make agreement any easier.

For Singapore Repertory Theatre’s production, director Daniel Jenkins was drawn to precisely that complexity. He first heard about the play through a friend from drama school who now works at the National Theatre in the UK. The friend had seen the production and recommended it, prompting Jenkins to get hold of the script. What he found was a comedy that offered considerably more than an evening of laughs.

“I think that ultimately, it’s such a well-written play. I mean, the way that the play is structured. It’s nice that it’s a comedy. I mean, it’s so hard to find a good comedy. You can find comedies that are just full of fluff and that’s it, right? I mean, there’s a room for that. And there’s a space for those plays that are just purely entertaining and will make you laugh and that’s it,” he says. “But to find a good comedy that is very well-crafted, that has a little bit more to say than just slapstick comedy and gags, is rare. And that’s really what struck me about the play, really, is that it’s more than just a comedy. There is actually so much more meat to it.”

He was also struck by the craftsmanship of Spector’s writing: the naturalistic dialogue, the construction of the characters, and the way the humour is embedded in the text itself. “The characters are very well written. The way that he writes the dialogue is so naturalistic. And he writes the jokes in. I mean, they’re there. I mean, one discovers stuff. But I mean, in his stage directions, in where the line breaks. So it’s just a really, really well-crafted play, I think.”

That attention to detail matters because the comedy depends on the audience recognising the characters as real people. Although their behaviour can become absurd, Jenkins does not want the actors to play them as exaggerated stereotypes. The characters may be recognisable types within a particular school community, but the production must find the individuals beneath those labels.

“It’s actually quite a tricky play to cast because of those things,” he says. “The characters are, to some degree, they could be thought of as stereotypical, although we’re not playing them at all like that. You want them to be as real as possible. But you also have to have actors who can balance the comedy and have a sense of what’s funny and what isn’t funny and timing and things like that. But also there’s depth and truth there.”

For Jenkins, the actors must resist the temptation to signal the joke. The characters do not know they are being funny; they are simply trying to make their arguments, defend their positions and navigate a situation that matters deeply to them. The humour emerges from the gap between their earnestness and the increasingly ridiculous circumstances in which they find themselves.

“Comedy is technical, actually,” he explains. “It’s about the timing. You’ve really got to sort of take it apart to allow that comedy to hit, but ultimately I think it’s playing it for real. I mean, these people don’t think they’re funny, they don’t know they’re being funny, they don’t know the physicality that they do, or the lines that they give, they don’t think they’re funny lines. They’re all extremely genuine and honest and real, so I think if we play them real, and you aim for that truthfulness, then you can mine it for the comedy.”

It is an approach that also makes the play’s more serious moments possible. If the characters are treated as caricatures, their disagreements become easy to dismiss. But when the audience understands that each person is acting from a genuine sense of concern, it becomes harder to decide where its sympathies should lie.

Jenkins hopes audiences will find the production funny, but he is equally interested in what happens after the laughter. “I think people will find it really funny. And more than find it funny, they’ll be moved by it and they’ll be questioning their beliefs and they’ll question their thoughts. And there’s a lot more to it than just coming and having an entertaining night at the theatre, which hopefully they will have.”

That sense of moral complexity begins with the characters themselves. There is no convenient villain whose behaviour explains everything that goes wrong. Each person has a particular understanding of what the community needs, and each believes that their position is justified.

Munah Bagharib, who plays Carina, approaches her character through the sincerity of those intentions. Carina wants to belong to the school community and contribute to its decisions, but she is not simply there to agree with everyone else. Her instinct is to consider the people who might not have been heard, and to question decisions that appear settled simply because the group has reached a consensus.

“I think it really starts with her intention,” Munah says. “Carina comes into this really just wanting to be part of the community, wanting the best for everyone. So she’s sincere about what she feels and what she wants to achieve from being part of the board. So I try to, you know, give her that honesty with whatever, however she thinks, so that will come through. Like, that is always the start of a character for me, right? It starts with, like, where does this come from or why do you want to see this?”

As the newcomer to the board, Carina has an advantage that the others may not: she does not carry the history of the group’s previous discussions and decisions. She arrives without the accumulated baggage of relationships, established positions and compromises. That outsider perspective allows her to ask questions that others may have stopped asking.

“I like that she is the newcomer to the board, and she’s the outsider,” Munah says. “So she doesn’t come with the baggage of what this board has had, you know, in the last few years, because they’ve been around for a while. So she comes in with quite a fresh perspective. I kind of like that there’s this new person. She’s asking the questions that probably the decision has been made because of the consensus, but maybe some people had their reservations about it and never really said it. So she comes in and she probably points it out, and then it gives a fresh new take on it, like, ‘Huh, actually, why didn’t I think of that?’”

Carina’s willingness to speak up is not necessarily about being the loudest person in the room. Rather, she believes that silence can also have consequences. There are moments when keeping quiet means allowing a decision to stand without properly examining who it serves or who it leaves out.

Munah describes her as someone who is inclined to advocate for the voiceless, but who also understands that disagreement need not be hostile. “She’s also the type that doesn’t sit back. Even though there are loud voices in the room, if this is how I feel, I’m going to say it in the nicest way, but I’m going to tell you that I disagree. Because I think it’s important to, at some point, take a stand, because sometimes keeping quiet is also actually taking a stand.”

Jenkins sees Carina as an important point of entry for the audience. In the opening scenes, she is encountering a group of people whose established relationships and strong opinions can seem bewildering from the outside. Her perspective gives viewers a way into the community and its increasingly complicated conversations.

“Certainly in the first half, Carina is like your everyman,” he says. “Through Carina, that’s how the audience is seeing these people, particularly in that first scene, because it starts and you’ve got these quite large characters talking about sort of in-depth things, and she’s sat there going, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ All these strange people. And that’s really what the audience are seeing as well. So I think we really follow Carina’s journey.”

For Munah, the role has also become an exercise in self-reflection. She recognises something of her own people-pleasing tendencies in Carina, particularly the desire to hear everyone out and maintain a sense of belonging. But the character also challenges her to consider when listening and accommodating others might come at the expense of expressing her own convictions.

The distinction between the actor and the character is part of the work. Munah draws on her own experiences where they are useful, but she is also conscious that Carina has a different set of values, wants and needs. “I think it’s different when you’re hosting and when you’re acting, because I guess acting, you’re taking on a character, right, and a character with different values, different sort of wants and needs. So that’s what I try to focus on, in terms of putting the different hats on. Where it comes from, like my own personal story, for example, or where I can maybe reference that, but also place that into this person that I’m playing.”

Playing Carina has made her more conscious of the importance of taking a stand, even when it might be easier to keep the peace. It is a lesson she expresses with affection and a little humour: “Carina is who I want to be when I grow up.”

If Carina represents the newcomer questioning the group’s assumptions, Julie Wee’s Suzanne is more deeply embedded in the school community. She has a position of influence and a strong investment in the institution. But Wee is careful not to reduce Suzanne’s convictions to a desire for control or status. At the heart of the character’s concerns is her belief that her children must be kept safe.

“I think it’s about her children, right? And her children who are in the school, it’s about that ability to keep them safe,” Wee says. “So losing that, and then the community — it’s like, my children are that. But the dressing around that is, actually, I have a lot of clout here, and I have influence. I am the president of the executive committee. And community, where do you find community? That’s where she found community, in this school, right? Her family and community. So when you lose that, what do you have?”

The challenge for Wee is to protect the character’s genuine reasoning, even when Suzanne’s words or behaviour might come across as self-centred to the other characters. In performance, that means beginning with the reason Suzanne feels hurt or offended, rather than playing the outward reaction alone.

“As Suzanne, it’s very interesting because people say things to me and I react, and then we talk about her being, ‘Oh yeah, she’s just thinking about herself.’ And I’m like, in my perspective, I’m like, ‘No, you have pissed me off, and this is the reason why.’ So it’s more about protecting the reason why I have spoken, the reason why I’m offended, the reason why I believe what I believe, and then knowing that I come across a certain way. If I come across that way, but actually I’ve got to protect Suzanne’s genuine reasoning, I think that’s how I work.”

Wee’s understanding of Suzanne has also evolved through the research involved in preparing for the role. She initially found it difficult to imagine saying some of the character’s lines because she did not personally believe them. During the pandemic, she had experienced disagreements with a family member who opposed vaccination. Her first reaction was to dismiss that person as unreasonable, and the disagreement caused significant tension within the family.

But the play required her to listen more carefully to the other side. Reading, researching and hearing people explain their own experiences did not necessarily change her convictions, but it helped her understand how someone could arrive at a different conclusion.

“I went into the play going, okay, well, I vaccinated my kids and I’d obviously, I think vaccinations are a good thing. I had family members during COVID, my cousin, complete anti-vaxxer, right? Never got vaccinated. Anyway, it caused huge, huge arguments. And at the time you just go, ‘Okay, she’s mad.’ She’s like a black sheep of the family. Well, you know, we would ignore her.”

The process of working on the play complicated that response. “But because in the play you hear it from the other point of view, you suddenly go, actually, I’m sort of dismissing you because I just think you’re crazy. But actually, you’re coming from a very genuine place and I can now see it from your point of view.”

Wee is clear that understanding does not mean agreeing. The distinction matters: the play is not asking audiences to abandon their beliefs, but to examine how those beliefs are formed and whether they have made it impossible to listen to someone else.

“You see their logic, and if you follow their logic, actually I can see how,” she says. “And then now I feel like I can say what I need to say. Completely changed. Because that’s what’s interesting to see on stage: somebody else’s perspective that’s totally different from yours. ‘How can you say that? I don’t believe it.’ And then the play goes into a place where actually, I understand where you’re coming from. I don’t agree, but I understand why you…”

That movement from disbelief to a more complicated form of understanding is one of the play’s central dramatic pleasures. The audience may enter with its own firm opinions, but the shifting perspectives make it difficult to remain entirely comfortable in one position.

The school’s commitment to consensus is, on the surface, an admirable one. Everyone should have a voice; decisions should be made collectively; the community should be able to find a way forward that takes different perspectives into account. Yet the play asks what happens when the process of hearing everyone becomes so consuming that it prevents anyone from making a decision.

Jenkins recognises the contradiction. He enjoys the collaborative nature of rehearsal and wants the actors to feel that their ideas are valued. But collaboration cannot mean avoiding responsibility indefinitely. At some point, someone has to decide what happens next.

“I love the fact that we’re all open and everyone can share stuff. Ultimately, I have to make a decision,” he says. “Otherwise we never get anywhere.”

That tension between openness and authority is present in the rehearsal room as well as in the play. Jenkins describes his approach as one built around trust, honesty and an understanding that the director does not have all the answers. Having worked with many of the actors in Singapore, sometimes as a fellow performer and sometimes as a director, he was keen to create an environment in which they could contribute freely.

“I tried to set up my rehearsal whereby we all chit-chat and everyone’s opinion is as valid as anybody else’s. And we come to a consensus. You see what I did there?” he jokes, before adding that the principle is genuine: everyone is working towards making the best production possible.

For him, directing is not about entering the room and insisting that his authority makes his ideas automatically superior. He is still learning how best to communicate with actors, when to give a note and when to hold back, and how to recognise when someone else has found a better solution.

“I don’t have to go in there going, ‘Right, I’m the director, I’m in charge, I know everything, this is what we do, this is how it works.’ I don’t know everything. I mean, I really, really don’t know everything. And why should their input be any lesser than mine? So it’s sort of like, okay, well, you’ve got a great idea, then great. That’s great, let’s do that. That’s a much better idea than I had.”

Wee, who has worked with Jenkins as an actor before but is now experiencing his direction from the other side of the table, describes him as approachable and generous. She appreciates the detail he brings to the rehearsal process, particularly his willingness to ask questions that encourage the actors to look more closely at a scene or reconsider their understanding of a character.

Munah similarly describes the rehearsal room as a safe place to ask questions, admit uncertainty and request help. Jenkins says he wants actors to feel free to make suggestions without worrying that an idea will be judged before it has been explored. “I’ve got an idea. It’s probably shit. It probably is a really shit idea,” he says, describing how he sometimes introduces a suggestion. “And I’m open to that. And sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.”

The freedom to contribute, including the freedom to get something wrong, is important to the creative process. Without it, actors might simply wait for instructions rather than make discoveries of their own. Yet the same question that governs the play’s school board eventually applies to the rehearsal room: how does a group preserve everyone’s ability to contribute while still moving towards a decision?

The play also draws attention to the uneven distribution of influence within a group. Some people are more confident, more established or simply more persistent in making themselves heard. The person who speaks most loudly can end up setting the terms of a discussion, while others may have reservations that never make it into the room. Carina’s outsider status allows her to notice those silences. Suzanne’s position within the school, meanwhile, gives her a different kind of authority, one tied to her influence and her sense of belonging.

The result is a community in which power is not always exercised through direct confrontation. It can also lie in whose concerns are treated as urgent, whose opinions are considered reasonable, and who has the confidence to keep speaking when others would rather move on.

Although Eureka Day is rooted in a particular Californian school culture, Jenkins decided against relocating the play to Singapore. He initially considered whether the production should be reset locally, and the team discussed the question of accents and how the characters might sound. But the more he considered the script, the more he felt that its specific setting was integral to the work.

“Personally, I’m not a huge lover of setting plays. You know, I think if the play’s a good play, it will work regardless of where it’s set,” he says. “And the play is so specifically California, and with these particular types of characters in this particular type of location, that it just wouldn’t transfer here. If we were to change them and try to — it just doesn’t make sense here. So it has to be set where it is.”

That decision does not mean the play is culturally distant from its Singapore audience. Jenkins believes that the setting can even provide a useful degree of separation. Viewers may initially recognise the characters as a particular kind of Californian parent, and feel able to laugh at their behaviour from a distance. But as the conversations develop, the issues become increasingly familiar.

“I don’t see that it is not relatable, or that people are going to go, ‘Oh, it’s America, it’s got nothing to do with me.’ I think, in some ways, that distance enables them to laugh at them a bit more, then go, ‘These are those types of people. We can laugh at them, that’s funny, because it’s not really us.’ And yet the conversations that they have, and the debates they have, as it progresses, are actually things that probably a lot of Singaporeans are talking about.”

As a Singaporean parent himself, Jenkins recognises the questions surrounding parental choice, school communities and the expectations placed on families. The play’s specific debate may be shaped by its American setting, but its underlying concerns, such as how parents protect their children, how much influence they should have, and how communities manage disagreement, are not exclusive to one country.

The pandemic has made those questions even more immediate. Although the play is set before COVID-19, audiences will bring their own experiences of the vaccination debate into the theatre. The production does not need to explain why the subject is contentious; the audience already knows how quickly discussions about personal choice and collective responsibility can become emotionally charged.

For Jenkins, vaccination is ultimately one part of a wider conversation about truth: whose version of events is accepted, what happens when two people believe different things with equal conviction, and how a community can reconcile those positions.

“A lot of the focus of the play is really about truth and whose truth; my truth is different from your truth, but we both think it’s true,” he says. “And how a group of people have the best intentions at heart, how do they reconcile all their different viewpoints? And does working by consensus work? Does that actually work? I mean, ultimately in the play, it doesn’t really work very well, right? Eventually someone has to make a decision.”

The play’s relevance, then, extends well beyond the question of vaccination. The conversations between its characters echo the kinds of disagreements people encounter at work, among friends and within families. The audience may recognise a familiar argument, or perhaps an uncomfortable version of itself, in the way the characters try to make their case.

For all its topical concerns, Jenkins is keen to preserve the play’s comic energy. But audiences should not assume that the tone remains the same throughout. The production’s first half invites laughter as the characters negotiate their differences, often with an earnestness that makes their behaviour all the more amusing. The second half, however, moves into more emotionally demanding territory.

“Hopefully they will walk in expecting, ‘Oh, it’s a gaspingly funny comedy. It’s the funniest thing ever,’” Jenkins says. “Hopefully they will find it funny. First half. Second half, you know, kicks you in the teeth because you’re suddenly like, wow, it feels like a different play, because you’re taken somewhere where you’re not expecting to go and you feel something.”

He points to a particularly moving monologue from Suzanne as an example of how the play shifts beyond comedy. It is a moment that asks the audience to sit with the character’s vulnerability rather than simply laugh at her certainty or behaviour. As the actors work through the second act, Jenkins has been struck by the emotional journeys the characters have travelled since the beginning.

“I’m sitting there going, wow, these characters, their journey from where we’ve seen them in Act One, now we know how they’ve begun, and here we are in Act Two, and I’m like, wow, they’ve all sort of gone on these huge journeys, these big emotional journeys, which is great.”

That tonal shift is part of what makes the play compelling for him. The audience is not simply invited to laugh at a group of people behaving badly; it is asked to stay with them long enough to understand what is at stake. The comedy opens the door, but the emotional turns complicate what the audience thought it knew.

And perhaps that is the most interesting question Eureka Day leaves behind. In a room full of people who believe they are doing the right thing, it is tempting to look for the person who is being unreasonable. It is harder to consider whether we might be the one refusing to listen, or whether our own certainty has made it difficult for someone else to speak.

Jenkins hopes audiences leave with a willingness to reconsider a perspective they had not previously entertained. Munah, meanwhile, suggests a more personal exercise: think about which character you are most like. It may be an amusing question to ask on the way out of the theatre, but it could also be the most revealing one.

After all, the point is not necessarily to decide who wins the argument. It is to recognise why everyone is so determined to have their say, and to ask what happens when being heard becomes more important than hearing one another.

Photo Credit: Singapore Repertory Theatre

Eureka Day plays from 18th November to 6th December 2026 at the KC Arts Centre. Tickets available here