Bill Irwin Hopes Eureka Day Will Get People Talking

Not every actor can give a Tony-winning performance as George in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and then turn around and play the mustachioed Mr. Noodle opposite a Sesame Street legend like Elmo. For decades, Bill Irwin has built a reputation as one of the most versatile artists in the theater world—acting, writing, directing, clowning—sometimes doing them all at the same time. But right now, he’s just wearing his actor hat as Don, the head of a progressive California private school, in Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day, opening on Broadway this fall at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Audiences might even glimpse more of the real Bill than they’re accustomed to seeing from the professional shapeshifter.

“Every day, [director] Anna Shapiro guides me toward a Don who’s actually much closer to Bill than I would’ve thought on day one,” Irwin said during the play’s official press day. Eureka Day satirizes the behind-the-scenes debates that shape a liberal-minded school’s vaccine policies after a Mumps outbreak, and Don is the mealy-mouthed man charged with moderating those prickly conversations. Audiences will laugh at all the moralizing and linguistic tiptoeing, but the comedy is born from the feeling of looking in a mirror with harsh overhead lighting.

“They're wrestling with the questions of what you do to protect children and educate them,” Irwin said to Tamsen Fadal on The Broadway Show. Since the Covid pandemic upended America’s education system, it’s the question that’s launched parents, teachers and lawmakers into an endless game of tug-of-war over the kids stuck in the middle. You would have good reason to assume Spector’s play was ripped from headlines of the past four years—and yet, you would be wrong. Eureka Day premiered at Berkeley, CA’s Aurora Theatre Company in 2018, two years before vaccines became the hottest topic of conversation at everyone’s breakfast table. But Irwin is hoping that conversation—resettled in one private school meeting room with a collection of well-meaning parents and school board members played by Jessica Hecht, Amber Gray, Thomas Middleditch and Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz—will take new shape immediately after the curtain comes down.

“It’s an actor’s hope that people [say], ‘I don't have time to go to the stage and say hi, because I have to ask my husband or my wife for my kids about what we just saw,’” said Irwin. Rather than asking for an autograph or a photo, he’d much rather the question out of people’s mouths be, “Could we talk about that?”

Watch the full segment below.