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[0:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Hello and welcome to the Drama Book Show. My name is Mark-Eugene Garcia and this is Episode 6 of Season 2. Now we're sliding in with a very special episode, a countdown to the Tony's episode for the play Eureka Day, which was nominated for Best Revival of a Play. A couple weeks ago, we had Jonathan Spector, Jessica Hecht, and Ruthie Fierberg in to talk all about the show. Now with such great artists on hand, you don't need me to talk about the show. Let's let them do it. Let's dive right on into Eureka Day.

[0:52] Ruthie Fierberg: Great. Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming out tonight. Appreciate it. My name is Ruthie Fierberg. I'm the Executive Editor of Broadway News, the home for digital journalism on Broadway. You can visit broadwaynews.com for all the news that's fit to print about our industry. And it is my pleasure to be here at the Drama Book Shop tonight for this special Q&A with Tony Award nominated playwright Jonathan Spector and Tony nominated actor Jessica Hecht, both who are recognized for their work in Manhattan Theater Club's production of Jonathan's play Eureka Day. Everybody got their copy? Excellent. I can't wait to have mine. And by the way, it just won the Drama League Award for Best Revival of a Play.

So congratulations to Jonathan and the whole company. Just a little bit of background because I like to get that out of the way so we can get into the good stuff. Eureka Day marks Jonathan's Broadway debut and his first Tony nomination. Jessica was last nominated in 2023 for her turn in Summer 1976. And before that, she earned a nod for her performance in A View from the Bridge. So this is her third Tony nomination for her portrayal of Suzanne in Eureka Day. How many of you saw the production? Okay, so a few and a few who are just going to take home a copy. Okay, so for those of you who don't know Jonathan's play, I feel silly like explaining it next to you, but I'm going to do it anyway. It's set in a progressive private school in Berkeley, California.

The school is called Eureka Day and the parent executive committee makes all of their decisions by consensus. But that gets complicated when there is a mumps outbreak and the committee needs to examine their vaccination policy. So Jonathan, my first question to you is I know that you were inspired to write about this because it was this issue where people who were self-categorizing by belief system, still this one issue was a place where you didn't know where anybody stood even based on that categorization. But how did you go from that idea to a school, specifically a PTA style meeting, like the structure of it and what you wanted to examine about how society functions in decision-making spaces?

[3:29] Jonathan Spector: Yeah, I think it took a little while to land on exactly what the container for the play would be. I think I knew the impulse was that experience of talking to people with whom I shared educational background, a political viewpoint, general values, but with about whom this one thing we lived in separate realities and that was strange and intriguing to me. And so I wanted to explore that. And then it was about trying to find a situation in which it won't work for kind of everybody to make their own choice, but it only can be made collectively, which is both more broadly how vaccines work, but also specifically within a school context is very much the case. I think I'd had a couple of different ideas I abandoned early on before I landed there.

[4:12] Ruthie Fierberg: Do you remember what any of those ideas were?

[4:18] Jonathan Spector: There was like a not very good 10, 15 pages of a divorced couple where one wants to get the child vaccinated and one doesn't, which is something you hear happens a lot. But like more within a, it's such an entirely different play that could have been like within a single family unit versus within, you know.

[4:35] Ruthie Fierberg: Yeah.

[4:36] Jonathan Spector: And my wife is a teacher and has worked at a lot of progressive schools. And so I have been around that. Now my daughter is in third grade and is in a school, not totally unlike that school. But at the time I wrote the play, she was very young and was not yet. So it's actually quite bizarre since I wrote the play so long ago initially and had not had those experiences. And then even when we're in rehearsal and I go home and you're like picking up my daughter from school and like chatting with a parent. I'm like, it's so strange. I'm having a conversation that's like a conversation from the play, but I wrote the play years before I'd ever had such a conversation.

[5:13] Ruthie Fierberg: That's so funny that you actually hadn't had your own like PTA style meetings to draw from that you just, it's a full construct of, I guess, the people that you knew and imagining what it would be like if they all had to do this together.

[5:26] Jonathan Spector: Yeah. I'd spent enough time in Berkeley and in the environment too.

[5:32] Ruthie Fierberg: For sure. Jessica, one of the things that you said in another interview is that the play intends to, and I'll quote you, look at idealism in an empathetic way. And I think that's so interesting because while the play has specifically the issue of vaccines at the core, it's not really about that. And I think that's what you were getting at, look at idealism in an empathetic way. Can you flesh that out a little for me?

[6:03] Jessica Hecht: Yeah. I had in some of Jonathan's vast research, he's really scholarly in the way he puts plays together. I had stumbled across this idea. I don't know if it was exactly articulated that way, but it made me think about how people who are really certain of what they believe can overwhelm you and that we look at them being didactic and we think about their ideas and we think about how we relate to those ideas, but we don't usually have enough time with them to understand the need for those ideas in their own personal lives and to look at everybody who's holding an idea that has the kind of weight that vaccines do with maybe a little more empathy first to try to figure that out. To do the forensics of anybody's idealism requires that you think, okay, what happened there that this has become?

Which I think that the play does so beautifully, but you build us to get there, right? We don't know that we're actually going to find out why anyone feels the way they do. And then we get to this surprise scene with your character and Amber Gray's character, Karina, that gets to the heart of, I think, that you don't have to have the tinfoil hat on to believe differently from what is either mainstream or even not mainstream. How our personal experience is so shaped that conviction that we can have.

[7:46] Jessica Hecht: Yeah, and I thought that scene as we worked on it, I was always curious because I know when you're making a new play, it's not often truly a new experience for the playwright. Any new play has had so many iterations in other places. And so Jonathan surely has heard that scene done by many people, but I think one day in rehearsal, Amber just got very emotional as we were listening to the story, as I was telling the story and we were trying to listen to each other. And it just exemplified why the chemistry between two actors can create a whole take on something that you think, oh, this is the way it's written. But I think it's our chemistry and Amber's huge heart and just a lot of elements. I don't know if you want to speak to how that scene is constructed or anything.

[8:43] Jonathan Spector: Yeah, it's a funny, I can't remember which one of the, some interview we were doing and you were talking about your process of rehearsing that, of finding that scene and like entering different rooms. And I was like, oh, that's what she was doing in rehearsal. I had no idea. But I feel like I have very, there are other places in the play where I have very specific ideas about how they should sound or the tempo or the rhythm. I feel like that, though I'm not an actor, I know enough about actors to know that that story, the actor just needs to find their own way through it. And I don't have the same sense of it must be like this. It just must be truthful and however that manifests, I think.

[9:37] Ruthie Fierberg: So that's interesting because Jessica just mentioned that there have been other productions of this. The first production was in 2018. And so it's been around a little bit. And the idea that different people, actors, of course, bring different things to it. But of course, different directors do the same. I'm curious about your pairing with Anandi Shapira. And what was it in like your first meetings before you decided to collaborate that made you think, oh, she understands something about this? Or was I don't know if it was that she saw something that you knew, or that she saw something that you didn't know that made you lean towards her?

[10:21] Jonathan Spector: Yeah, Lynn Meadow had suggested Anna and I, although I knew Anna was an incredible director, I initially was a little skeptical because I associated her with Steppenwolf and these very muscular, aggressive plays. I was like, that's not Berkeley. But then we had a phone call and I think we talked for three or four hours or something. And I just felt like she really understood the play really deeply. And I was really excited to get to collaborate with her on it.

[10:54] Ruthie Fierberg: Was Jessica her suggestion?

[10:56] Jonathan Spector: It was.

[10:58] Ruthie Fierberg: See? There she is, a smart woman, a smart woman. And then from both of you within the process, what did she clarify as you rehearsed, as you teched, as she noted the show that kept deepening it for you?

[11:17] Jonathan Spector: Yeah, I think there are a couple places. And this is a combination of just the quality of artists we had in the ensemble and where we are in a moment of time is there were a couple of places where she would just streamline and tighten and she'd suggest maybe we don't need this because now everybody gets it because we've been through COVID. Apparently so much so that there used to be an intermission and there's not. So that's a lot of tightening. Although it didn't actually, I think the total runtime was not that much longer with, if you don't count the intermission, it was, and then there were places where she would say, I think we could lose this section because the actors can just do it. We don't need all these words. And she was usually right. And so that, that was quite exciting. Then we had a lot of drama. The only real rewriting.

[12:32] Jessica Hecht: The story that was being told. But then you talked to people afterwards, you're like, Oh, nobody really got that. And you're like, Let me see if I can try again to surface this a little more explicitly.

[12:58] Jessica Hecht: Yeah. Anna, why don't you tell us a little bit more about your character and then what Anna brought out in you? Or am I saying her name right? Is she Anna?

[13:16] Jessica Hecht: I always said Anna and she was like, I love that you're saying Anna but it's Anna.

[13:20] Jessica Hecht: Okay, yeah. Anna and what Anna brought out in you?

[13:24] Jessica Hecht: And I will say something that I always found fascinating and I always do in some way. You got to have joy in this particular audience response because we had, because Jonathan had done it beautifully and successfully in multiple other theaters, we would have on any given night someone who had seen it before. And I would say, Oh my God, they'd say, Oh, I just love this play. I'm so happy to see it again. Oh, did something new hit you in this production? Or it's quite different. And they'd say, it's not different at all. I just thought no, it's pretty much just the same. Loved it. Was just laughed in all the same places.

[14:06] Jessica Hecht: Because when you're on the inside, like you're noticing every comma and every although that scene does sound pretty significantly changed. But it's also that what an audience is receiving is the beginning, the middle and the end and the nuances of what they laugh at. They may say one specific joke was a little more funny and on any given night, there might be a different one this one, but it's the storytelling is so strong that they're experiencing that, not the micro nuances that we're obsessing over.

[14:39] Jessica Hecht: But with Anna, I was, and Jonathan immediately pacified these fears and Anna surely as well that it wasn't a satire and it was really important to me. I think in the last five or six years, we've looked at woke culture and we've looked at parental behavior and all of these different subject matters that we engage in and satire gets you a certain distance as an audience, but it was not in any way interesting to me as a vehicle for the ideas of this play.

[15:13] Jessica Hecht: And Jonathan kept saying, this is not a satire. They've marketed something else to say satire and Jim was like our hero because it's complicated. The theater needs to sell the play and make sure people will laugh and this is how I'm bringing you into this conversation, but it is fascinating. They need to make everyone feel like you're going to be very comfortable tonight.

[15:36] Jessica Hecht: I think I might have heard Jon Stewart or some intelligent person on late night television once say, or maybe even someone speaking about SNL, I assure you that the use of satire to engage with the real troubles that we're having now as a society is limited. You have to move past the scope of what a brilliant, even a great SNL skit could do or a satirist just giving their night.

[16:18] Jessica Hecht: So I was anxious about that and that's what Anna and I talked about a lot and just the momentum of storytelling because you just want to stay a step ahead of the audience. So at the specific moment we were always, and then the story of Juniper, she was so helpful in allowing, and helping that process. And she also, which we didn't of course know when we were rehearsing the secret weapon of this set because the environment was so extraordinary.

[16:53] Jessica Hecht: Todd Rosenthal's scenic design was so on point. The library and from every poster to the books that were on the shelves to having you all sit on those little chairs and what that does. You turn your head and you see a great book you read as a child and you just felt truly that the environment gave us this character to bounce off of.

[17:21] Jessica Hecht: I have written another play that I think of as a satire and this play in my mind is a drama with a lot of jokes.

[17:31] Jonathan Spector: That's so interesting.

[17:33] Jonathan Spector: But I know other people don't conceive it that way, which they can think however they want. But one thing that it was interesting in just the journey of the play is learning when it was first done in Berkeley and I developed it with actors there and artists there. And there was never a moment when anyone needed to have a conversation about, are these real people?

[17:59] Jessica Hecht: That's what I was going to say.

[18:00] Jonathan Spector: Everybody knew them and knew people. I was surrounded by people like this. And then it was only when we started to start to be done outside of Berkeley that I realized that's something important to say that these are not exaggerated versions.

[18:12] Jonathan Spector: I think that's the difference for me between satire and drama is that there's not an absurdist piece to this. No one's pushing it into farce. No one's pushing it into hyperbole. I felt though, I don't know that I've spent any time in Berkeley, California. I felt that all of your characters on that stage and as played by this brilliant ensemble were very real.

[18:37] Jessica Hecht: And in hearing them speak, both what they spoke about and the way they spoke, I was like, oh yeah. Even if I've never met a person like that, I now know who Eli is of this theory. I know the tech bro who made it big, retired and now raises his kids in theory. And to see that realized was actually really rewarding for me. I love when I also feel like I go to a different place in any type of medium, but especially in a play because I live in New York.

[19:14] Jessica Hecht: So when something's in Chicago and feels very Chicago or when something is in Berkeley and feels very Berkeley, although I hear that many people feel like it could have been Brooklyn, I think that's exciting. All that to say, I want to know more about the specificity of your characters. Were you just writing dialogue and that led you to figure out who your parents on this committee were? Or did you think, I want to have someone of this circumstance and then you found their voice?

[19:48] Jonathan Spector: A little of both. I think I had some, and I had done, as I love to do anytime it's appropriate for the play, a bunch of interviews with people when I was researching the play. And some of it as then happens, when you do that, then the characters emerge as composites from like your drawing on different people that you talk to.

[20:06] Jonathan Spector: And then specifically this is also because it's like the town I was living in, it's also people I know and they're mashing together in various ways to make these characters.

[20:17] Jessica Hecht: Which is probably also helpful in that you want to blur some lines.

[20:20] Jonathan Spector: Yeah. Yes. No, I've never written anything where somebody is like only based on one person I know. That would be, that would feel a little inappropriate, I think, without permission at least.

[20:29] Jonathan Spector: Yeah. So it's an idea. I do tend to not know what I'm doing at the beginning. And so I do end up, yeah, just writing a lot of scenes that I don't necessarily know where they're going as I'm finding the characters. But I pretty early on has like a general sense of who the people were.

[20:44] Jonathan Spector: But just to jump back to the, like, it could be in Brooklyn and I've had this conversation, especially as the play is like going out and going to have, I don't know how many, at least a dozen regional productions next year.

[20:59] Jessica Hecht: That's incredible. Wow.

[21:00] Jonathan Spector: Yeah, it's going to be, yeah, it's going to be all around. And in Stockholm, there's going to be.

[21:06] Jessica Hecht: Cool.

[21:07] Jonathan Spector: Anyway, so it's very exciting. But one of the things I'll say is that it could, there's a sense in which it could be anywhere because there are people like this who exist in most metropolitan areas. And the big difference is and the importance of the specificity is in Brooklyn, like there are people like this, but to some degree, there's still a little bit of an outlier from whatever the total normative behavior is of the culture, whereas in Brooklyn, they are the normative behavior.

[21:37] Jessica Hecht: It's an important distinction.

[21:38] Jonathan Spector: Just the way you navigate it.

[21:40] Jessica Hecht: Yeah, definitely. I want to drill down into the character of Suzanne since we have Jessica sitting here. And I feel like her.

[21:55] Jonathan Spector: Okay. So for those who haven't seen it, we start with this meeting and then when they had snacks and then when they break, the new parent is like, God, where are these from? And Suzanne launches into this amazing story about this woman owned bakery and she suffered this tragedy. But the way that she tells this story is I feel like the first glimpse into just who these people are outside of the group as individuals and how, oh, yeah, remember, this isn't even though they're voting by consensus, this is not a natural consensus necessarily, even though it would seem it would be because of some more normative behaviors in Berkeley, California, like just when you read that story and when you read other pieces of her dialogue, is that what helps you? Do you go, oh, I know how to say this or I know how to walk because of this or what are you gleaning from text to build her?

[23:00] Jessica Hecht: Those stories are such helpful. I always think of it as you're climbing a wall when you're doing your play and that's a great handhold. It's really clear what that person's getting. This character is, she had this funny duality where she loves little kids. I love little kids and she loves little kids, but she was really, I think that's in the text that she talks as though she's telling a story every time something happens. It's as though she's speaking to some child.

[23:29] Jessica Hecht: I feel like she could be the birthday party entertainer.

[23:33] Jonathan Spector: Oh, she would be wonderful. Yeah, just wonderful.

[23:34] Jessica Hecht: I think that was the magic of how to get into Suzanne was to feel like she had been gifted a life where she would be around small children, which was also the, of course, terrible pain of her existence is that she was trying to correct something that she had truly fallen short, which is watching her own small child.

[24:02] Jessica Hecht: So I thought that made sense in that environment.

[24:05] Jessica Hecht: But she also, like a lot of people, like small children, are obsessed with like bad things happening at the same time. Like any story where someone—and she had this terrible tumor. It was a tumor. They didn't know what it was, but it was metastasized. It was large and it was protruding. Right, but there is almost like the childlike wonder to it as well. How bad could it get? But then this woman's story was so wonderful because after her traumatic brain injury, she was watching the cooking program and she realized that she had the ability to bake these remarkable scones. And as I would exit with her, she was so indulgent because I would say originally it was just stone fruit. She dried the peaches and apricots.

Oh, my God. God is in the details. You just get into the whole detail. She has this one with the liqueur soaked. I don't know if you're going through a difficult time with your wife. I would just go off the stage talking about how she could drink, eat these trashy scones and have a nice evening with her. She would just allow me to go on. But yeah, anyway, Suzanne had that duality and that's how I got into her. But that, like you say, like she's telling a story to a child, all of a sudden it's, yeah, that's where that voice comes from. And I'm obsessed with, okay, she in your body, you would like, you would rub your heart a lot and you would, whenever you were excited, you'd like kick or shuffle like a little kid would.

And I'm just like, these are the things that make a performance brilliant. And I feel less bad asking you about them because you're not still having to do them. So I'm not making you overthink something I have to go do on stage tonight. But does that just come out in rehearsal or does Anna say, I need you to be more like, where did those gestures and the physicalities of her come from?

[26:00] Jonathan Spector: I think Anna would be like, dial it back, baby. No, I did. It all came out of the performative nature of how are we doing today? How is everybody feeling? And I would just touch my chest a lot. I think also I was anxious a lot of this character and I would have this self-soothing. But also the way in which people who are around small children a lot, they tend to show their emotions because they're trying to instill in the child their own freedom to show their emotions. So if I was happy, I would kind of skip a little. And as soon as I got into the library, I would start skipping because it just seemed like it would be so nice for everybody to feel good while around these books. Yeah, it was a very, yeah, I'm sure the other actors found it a little distracting. But they said they were very generous to me.

[27:02] Jessica Hecht: No, I think that's what makes it. It gives them something to respond to, I would think. Ruthie, that's a wonderful thing about this ensemble. I did think many nights when we were there, there's something that is key in a great ensemble, which is you pass the ball to somebody. And there are certain actors in our group like Thomas, who is a superb improv actor, and who played Eli, and Bill, who, you know, has, of course, stunning ability to connect, but all of the actors would toss the ball to you. So nobody would ever end on a dropped energy, they would pass the ball and you would just be like, Oh, my God, this is fabulous. And it was a consistent quality of this ensemble that made the play sing. I think it's very, it's a very underrated skill as an actor to be like, now you go.

[27:49] Jonathan Spector: Yeah, yeah. Jonathan, watching all of this, were there interpretations of the characters you'd known to their core that surprised you other than what Jess was doing with Suzanne?

[28:03] Jonathan Spector: Yeah, I think there was something that Amber brought to her, Karina, that I think was really just came from who she is as a person and as a mother. And the kind of, I think, despite all that had come before in that scene, couldn't help but have a certain kind of empathy and heart in hearing her story. And the way that manifested in her was something I'd never quite seen in that way, and was really lovely. And yeah, I think everybody, everybody, but everyone's always, it's always, that's what's so funny about the old cliché is plays are never finished, they're only abandoned. And part of that is because anytime you're in a room with actors working on your play, like all actors are different. And so there's no perfect version of the play that exists, like in the ether, because it isn't, there's a line that may be in this actor's mouth, like it's not quite right.

So you make a little adjustment, so it lands more naturally. And then if it goes on some other production, now it's not going to land as naturally in that actor's mouth, because everybody's just a little bit different. Yes. And that's the joy of it. And the sort of maddening thing about playwriting too, because you could never have a like, perfect version that is perfect for all ensembles everywhere.

[29:22] Jessica Hecht: Okay, so that makes me think about even how singular the Zoom scene is, not only because I've never seen anything like it, but because you don't have different actors taking on those voices, there's got to be there, that means there's a certain consistency to the lines and to what we're seeing in the, I guess the pacing can be different, but the words themselves, an audience is going to interpret. So we have this, the PTA decides to have a town hall, and there's a mumps outbreak, so they do it over Zoom, and we get to watch this chat unfold via projection. Does that, do you feel like you have more control over that scene?

[30:09] Jonathan Spector: Yes and no. I think that is a great example, because the first production, I worked so hard to be like, oh, I've got the timing so perfect on each of these, and then the next time it was produced, I had this moment of, oh no, I had it perfect for this very specific rhythm and cadences of those actors, and these actors have slightly different rhythm and cadence, now I need to slightly adjust the timing of when these comments fall, not massively, but just like a little bit to achieve this, you can never, again, imperfection with that scene is impossible, but at least achieve it, and then there's the other factor of what is the space you're in, because that scene and the laughter is very different if you're in a 150 seat house than if you're in a 650 seat house, just the intensity of the laughter and the length of it, and so then that also affects how that, just how it flows, and how you keep the energy going.

It's a very, it's a very strange thing. So I was also lucky, so I saw the show twice, the first time around, could not hear a word that the onstage actors were saying, because that is how hard we were laughing. The second time I saw it, I intentionally tried to hear more of what they were saying, and I caught some things, but, so the second time I saw it, I was doing a Q&A with you, Jessica, and the rest of the cast, and I don't remember which one it was, so I can't even throw them under the bus if I wanted to, but someone said that during rehearsal, they had said to you, like, Jonathan, you gotta do something else with this. It's not going to land, and you said, trust me. Was that just because you had the previous productions that you knew?

[32:02] Jonathan Spector: You know, there's nails everywhere we go. Yeah, I didn't know the first time that would be the reaction from the audience. It was a big surprise.

[32:07] Jessica Hecht: You were praying.

[32:08] Jonathan Spector: No, I really didn't know at all that anything like that, not the first time we did it, the very first iteration, the very first audience ever for the play was the first time I realized that's how the scene works.

[32:17] Jessica Hecht: Oh my God, wait, you didn't write it to have that kind of reaction?

[32:20] Jonathan Spector: No, I thought, because that theater, they had a very old subscriber base, and when they had done plays with projected text in the past, people had not paid a lot of attention, and so that's what my expectation was would happen, that it would be ambiently in the background, and it was still okay. A few people might read it, but most people would ignore it and just watch the scene, and it's okay, that's fine, and I used to have, before that, I had comments going constantly through the entire scene with no break, and then that first time there was an audience, you literally could not hear a word on stage, and so then I was like, oh my God, that's not…

[33:00] Jessica Hecht: Wow, what an example of when people say you learn from the audience.

[33:02] Jonathan Spector: Yeah, absolutely, so then I went and had to sculpt the scene much more so that certain things are in the clear, but it's very tricky in rehearsal. I think I once, I don't know if it was that moment, at some point I remember sheepishly saying to all of you, it's okay, there's going to be a lot of laughter here, and somebody was like, don't say that, you don't know. Sorry.

[33:18] Jessica Hecht: No, it wasn't, Jessica, because I remember in our pre-press…

[33:25] Jonathan Spector: I think it was Thomas who had said that. But Jessica, you were like, there's this one scene that has to do with technology that I think is going to be amazing. I was like, okay, if you say so, and there it was. But knowing that the laughter could and often does drown out what's going on stage, how do you craft a scene for the on-stage actors that both matters and doesn't matter in terms of plot? If you miss a word or five lines, it'll be okay. How do you…

[34:00] Jonathan Spector: There's not a lot of crucial plot in the scene, but the things that are important to hear happen at a time when there's no comments or where the comments are not funny, so that that stuff will be heard. But it's tricky, and then of course it varies from night to night too, so you can't count on it being like the most raucous nights. Yes, you can't hear barely anything, but other nights you can hear more, so it's a very strange thing. And of course, it's not what the scene really is in a way, like the four in the back are, except for a few moments, they are in the background. And then it really is a triangulation between the comments, the audience, and the character of Don who's trying to… The principal trying to moderate.

[34:45] Jonathan Spector: With increased desperation as it goes on, and so there's that sort of dynamic between all of those things, of which then the other people sometimes are part of that and sometimes are… It's a true theatrical expression of herding cats, I feel like. If anyone wants to know what it looks like, that's what it looks like, and perhaps what it sounds like.

[35:03] Jessica Hecht: Jonathan, I'm curious from you being on the inside of that scene, how did it evolve throughout your run? If it did, or did it become consistent and you guys got accustomed?

[35:14] Jessica Hecht: Yeah, we needed to… I had a couple of shows where I wanted to listen to other things going on and observe other things, and it really screwed stuff up. It's meticulously designed and you couldn't… Even if you would hear something, because the lines are in a very specific way, their character details that Jonathan gives us, there's a wonderful moment when Chelsea's character starts talking about how important breast milk is for the… Her character just always is talking about issues with the gut and inflammation of these people. I hope nobody here has an issue with inflammation. But bakeries, gut… No, the gut health was her whole thing. She really cornered the market on gut health issues.

[36:17] Jessica Hecht: My name is Jessica Hecht, and welcome to the Drama Book Show!

[38:22] Jessica Hecht: We spoke about Todd Rosenthal's scenic design. So I did want to just ask about Clint Ramos's costume design, because I thought it was so brilliant and it's like in color palette and giving us this and giving us a sense of California and giving us a sense of these people. And I have to say, Jessica, Suzanne's, I don't know the like the long sweaters or the like the flowy linen dresses and the scarf. It was just giving me so many details. Can you tell me about your collaboration with him? He was so kind and let me send him links for my dresses. I thought the dresses should look like a child could wear them if she wanted to be really well-dressed. So all the dresses or something a child would be happy to wear maybe a lot of like nap dresses as they call them now.

They're so pretty and sweet. And I was like, Oh my God, she lived alone. And yeah, I had some images I really asked him to look at. And he basically so generously bought those dresses and then bought the sweaters and we figured it out together. But there, there was the sweaters he put over it were just his stroke of and Johanna, who's his assistant's Johanna fan. Well there was just a stroke of their aesthetic genius. Yeah. Amazing that he was very nice. He really wants the actor to feel like they're dressed with the integrity of their character or the lack of integrity.

[39:51] Jessica Hecht: We do have time for one or two questions from all of you. If anyone has one, otherwise I have a final question, but if anyone has a hankering for Jonathan or Jessica to answer something from you, now is your moment. Don't be shy. Now.

[40:19] Audience Member: The question is about your general writing process.

[40:22] Jonathan Spector: Oh, I wish I had one. I think it's different for every play and every play kind of creates its own process around it. I'll usually, yeah, begin with some very, I never have a plot at the beginning or a story usually. And so I'll begin with, I usually begin with a question, like something that I'm trying to understand and then we'll do these days more. I didn't used to early on, but now I find myself doing lots of research for, which is, but not really directed research, just like chasing things down rabbit holes that seem connected and then whatever seems interesting and love to do a lot of interviews if it's a subject that it's appropriate to do interviews for. Yeah. And then at a certain point you, you have exhausted all of your procrastination and you have to just start writing.

And then usually I'll, at a certain point have a very loose outline. Although what's amazing is when I actually started writing, like sometimes I've gone back and looked, this will have half a page of notes of this is what I think the play is going to be and vague sense of what happens in it. And then, and then the process of writing the play is you so long have no idea what you're doing or how this is going to work or, but then when I get to the end and it's finished and then I would go back and look at that first page and I'm like, Oh, I did that thing that I thought, like I did end up actually doing what I thought I would much more than it felt like in the middle when you're just feeling lost in the woods of like, how am I ever going to make any of this work or. Yeah. That it feels like you did go from A to Z. Even if you thought you were going from like A to five, you were like, Oh look, it's Z.

[42:16] Jessica Hecht: Yeah, go ahead.

[42:26] Audience Member: How has the work changed you as a creative and what's a message you hope we walk away with?

[42:39] Jonathan Spector: I think the way that this play has changed me is less the play itself than I've never had a play that's where I've gotten to see and be involved in so many different productions in so many different places. And I think there's something about that. I think that even, I don't know how to, how it manifests consciously exactly, but I think it does shift the writing when you begin to think about it as something that may have this greater life and imagining it beyond when you are in the room working on it and how other people might receive it. And I don't, it's inchoate, but I think it did, it has shifted something and I don't really, the second your second question is one that I'd never have an answer for of what I want people to take away from the work. I, yeah, I feel like if I could answer that in a sentence, then I would just write an essay rather than a play.

[43:37] Jessica Hecht: No, that's what you do. How has it changed you as a creative, Jess?

[43:41] Jessica Hecht: Oh, this, this is just a play that makes you really invest in your own intuitions about something that you know will have a certain emotional, you hope will have a certain emotional complexity if you follow your gut about it. And I think if you rack up a certain number of plays that are particularly new plays about complicated subjects and you do enough where you think I'm really scared that I'm off the track, but I'm going to go there anyway and it yields some fruit. Fruit. You start to get a little more confidence. I always struggle with confidence. So that's, I guess the answer for that. And the second section, the second, was there a message that you hoped? Oh, the empathy message that we should listen to each other a little bit more, even if the other person has a point of view that you think is for the birds.

[44:39] Jonathan Spector: Yeah.

[44:41] Jessica Hecht: So I'll close out with my last question, which does have a spoiler in it because like you were saying, the last true scene is them. Are they going to come to a consensus? Are they not? And then we have the coda that Suzanne is not there. And everybody cracks up when the lights come up and it's, they just got rid of her, which is funny. And, but it also both times made me sad because it means that the solution was getting rid of the opposition, was abandoning the principle of consensus. I'm curious how you are left with it. And I guess you, you wrote it to be that, but how does it make you each feel at the, when you reach the end?

[45:30] Jonathan Spector: Yeah. I mean, it's, yeah, there's a tragic element to it because this Suzanne, both personally for Suzanne as somebody who's dedicated her life to this place and making this place and then is ultimately because of her beliefs pushed out of it. But it's more, I think the tragedy of it is broader than that, which is that they as a group destroy the thing to save the thing. And it's not that they're, which is not to say they're doing the wrong thing. Like I personally think they're doing the right thing, but it's not, but the way they're doing it is by doing away with this thing that is core to how, to the existence of the place and its ethos. And so there's something tragic in that. Like the metaphor that I have used to talk about it is, may we be so lucky to ever get this chance.

But like the conversation over like expanding the Supreme Court, because it's the people who are skeptical of that idea, I think are right that once you begin to do that, then people will just keep doing it. And like eventually you're going to destroy this thing as it exists now. But when the alternative is that you allow this really, as it functions now where it's going to have been takeover by these extremists to just like that, that's probably worse, but it doesn't mean there isn't something lost in that change, even if it's the right thing to do.

[46:54] Jessica Hecht: I think we didn't end on Jonathan's note. I always think it was important to realize that, yeah, that she had to give up what she worked her whole career for her whole life for.

[47:07] Jessica Hecht: Thank you all so much for coming. Thank you Jonathan and Jessica for sharing all of that with us. Enjoy your copy of Eureka Day and apparently find a local production near you because they're going to be plenty.

[47:24] Jonathan Spector: That was such a great night and such a great interview about the show. The 78th annual Tony awards will be held on June 8th at radio city music hall. And I am so excited.

[47:35] Jessica Hecht: So remember to follow us on Instagram at drama book show podcast, as well as follow our event, bright at drama bookshop. And remember all of the books we talk about can be found here at the drama bookshop. And so can we, and we will see you at the bookshop.