HowlRound Theatre Commons: Jonathan Spector’s play Eureka Day stands as a poignant example of how theatremakers can help society collectively understand and engage with one of the most polarizing public health issues of our time: vaccination. As the world continues to struggle with vaccine hesitancy, misinformation, and distrust in public health institutions, theatre provides an essential medium for breaking through philosophical divides.
2 comments:
I have always advocated that theater represents real life and good actors and good theater makers have experienced a lot of life because they evoke the emotions of real-life people of how they would respond and react to real-life situations. When looking at public health and public problems, theater has made people realize how emotional in people are and not thinking about other people and not considering many different factors. I do have to say that a lot of times, theatergoers already believe in what a lot of theater is trying to say, and it is essential to reach audiences that might not have the same opinions because those are the audiences that need to listen and need the theater the most. It is vital to have a theater like this, even if not everyone who should be listening is listening, because once we stop, the conversation dies. The conversation should never end because it is such an essential factor of life to be able to communicate and to be able to ask questions.
This subject is very important for someone who deals with chronic health issues and an immune disorder. I’ve been in the ideation process for a multimedia story surrounding a disease outbreak (take a wild guess what global event inspired that), and its great to see how other productions tackle the subject, seeing as it can go from entertaining and engaging to a classroom bio lecture very quickly if not done well. Love the use of Zoom meetings as a medium on stage. It really expands the worldbuilding and gives the opportunity to play around with more VMD aspects that may not have been explored otherwise. The show don’t tell aspect of the herd immunity point is very nice. Normally, I’m apprehensive towards progressive high school devised theater for writing and slam poetry reasons, but this production seems to be well planned and executed. Also, the message is so true, please get vaccinated for stuff like COVID so those of us who can’t don’t suffer someone else's consequences.
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