A school of thought: Fusion gets a shot in the arm with ‘Eureka Day’

“Eureka Day,” opening at Fusion | 708 on Thursday, Feb. 5, and running through Sunday, Feb. 15, brings audiences into the intricacies of a school board. 

The play follows the board, which is made up of parents, as they discuss school admissions. Then the conversation takes a turn when they learn of a mumps outbreak. They grapple with the school’s vaccine policy and try to decide whether to close the school for some time.

“When people try to make decisions, even around serious issues, they can show their more humorous and comic sides as well,” Laurie Thomas, show director, said. “Because we’re human beings and we’ve got all that stuff in us.”

She said “Eureka Day,” written by Jonathan Spector, highlights the need for communication and she hopes the audience will leave with that message.

“We need to respect the fact that we need to communicate and that we’re not solo actors in this life,” Thomas said. “Human beings are not set up for that.”

Thomas said she wanted to bring the energy of a school to the stage making it more than a setting.

“We get, hopefully, a little sense of the kind of kinetic and chaotic atmosphere that a school can have in a good way to that kind of vitality and energy,” Thomas said. “So I wanted to bring that to the piece, not just people sitting there talking, but the real kind of vibe and life of a school.”

Thomas said she has 25 years of teaching experience and drew on that to model how committees work and how decisions are made in educational contexts.

She also drew on experiences from the COVID-19 pandemic, which she said the audience might resonate with.

“I think that it could bring up some of the fear that we felt at the beginning, the skepticism of what was coming out of politics,” Thomas said. “Even the skepticism that we had with some of the scientific points of view, that feeling of being unanchored and not knowing who to trust or who necessarily to turn to.”

However, she said, even with her experience and the pandemic parallels, she wanted to keep political judgment and position out of the play and leave it open-ended.

“What I love about coming together in a theatrical space and experiencing the journey of the story with these characters is you have the freedom to absorb the story, feel what you want to feel in that moment, and think what you want to think,” Thomas said.

“You’re not beholden to any kind of discussion … You have absolute freedom in the way you come to this piece,” Thomas said.

Elizabeth Secor is an arts fellow from the New Mexico Local News Fellowship program. You can reach her at esecor@abqjournal.com.