Renowned 2018 Vaccine Comedy Now Showing on Broadway
Theatre critic Lily Janiak reports 'Eureka Day' illuminates unseen dimensions from ~the~ conspiracy myth of our time.
Holiday greetings, I’m back after a rotation of offline fundraising pitches. This is TracingVRL, formerly TracingCOVID, the software-journalism project tracing the infodemic going viral.
Before we get started, a quick correction: California Gov. Gavin Newsom was divorced at the time of the incident mentioned in a past issue.
From here forward I’m adopting the publisher’s rule: paywalled posts stay paywalled. If they need more attention, I’ll bring them up from new angles in future issues.
You can catch adapted replays of past newsletters by following the TracingVRL LinkedIn page and find the difference between antivax and antivaxx at the new Glossary tab.
Introduction
A friend and I reminisced this week about the last Manhattan play we saw together, I Am My Own Wife, based on the true story of German antiquarian Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a transfem woman who lived out of the closet in both Nazi- and Communist-era East Berlin. We remembered a captivating show with one actor and spare stage set adorned with tea cups and armoires.
There’s an enlivening effect after plays in this era where most cinema productions, with the exception of Megalopolis, play on screen with that washed-out (digital?) color quality. Theatre sets, when done well, call up the mind to fill in blanks for a fuller session of imagination calisthenics, democracy-strengthening fitness routines Aristotle reportedly described in Poetics.
Lest you find me obsequious, the most biting critics call out set designers by name in their reviews:
🔓 Feb 22 Review: Big Data shows S.F.s theater can be just as revolutionary as its tech by Lily Janiak (San Francisco Chronicle) - “Before anyone enters the Toni Rembe Theater stage, Big Data takes a big dare. On a retro TV set, a giant play button appears. Silence. Anyone who’s encountered any digital device in the past couple of decades knows what one is supposed to do with such an icon. But are we, the audience, supposed to get up and press play on the play?”
Dec 01 1918 The New Plays by Dorothy Parker (Vanity Fair) - “It is difficult to speak of ‘atmosphere’ and ‘feeling’ without sounding as if one wore sandals and lived below Fourteenth Street, but you just can't mention Robert Jones' scenery without using the words. I never realized that so much atmosphere could be worked into one production. And it is gained with such seeming ease, too--gained by suggestion rather than by painstaking detail.”
Right now on Broadway is the 2018 anti-vax comedy (yes, comedy) Eureka Day. I so wish I were in the area to attend, as it shows vestiges of the “free speech” “censorship” dampeners and accusations, respectively, that we continue to hardly notice. From moving all ephemeral conversations to information-overseer-run platforms like Facebook where every offhand response and composed statement leaves an equally-weighted permanent record stripped of inflection, to strategically vague punching-down salvos belligerently bandied by Trump’s primary meme czar Elon Musk and tall venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. The play was first shown at Aurora theater in Berkeley, an important arts incubator which is now in a post-pandemic funding crunch.
🔓 Sep 04 Aurora’s Eureka Day really was that great. Now you can see it again (San Francisco Chronicle) -
Apr 08 Bay Area theater that premiered Oakland artist’s Broadway-bound play now facing fundraising emergency (San Francisco Chronicle) - “But six years after Aurora Theatre Company mounted the taut, laugh-till-you-hyperventilate Eureka Day, about a measles outbreak at an ultraliberal Berkeley private school where some parents are anti-vaxxers, Jonathan Spector’s script is heading to Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre ... The news comes as Aurora needs to raise $500,000 in order to have another season …”
🎁 Apr 24 2018 Aurora’s Eureka Day goes from so Berkeley to universal (San Francisco Chronicle) - “What follows is an ingeniously communicated total failure of communication. Framing and values become magic words that put the kibosh on any actual exchange of ideas. Uncomfortable is an all-powerful trump card. ... In one uproarious scene, Spector becomes one of the first playwrights to find a way to make a Facebook comments section cesspool work as live theater.”
If only to pressure the movie industry to up their artistic game, we could do worse than hustling over to behold a perfectly done play.
To see these bold ideas find entry points at lower-budget venues like Aurora before they can be picked up by a Broadway venue reminds that talent pipelines are vital for quality. Without support for the arts, we’d soon be a nation of losers.
Contents:
Bills to Protect Journalists: Anti-SLAPP and PRESS Act
Unreality Election 2024
Election 2024 Journalism
Remember What We Said About Air
Trends in Economic Chatter
AI in Healthcare
News Not Covered in This Issue
Bills to Protect Journalists 1) Anti-SLAPP and 2) PRESS Act
Two bills to protect journalists are alive and circulating in Congress. Instead of allowing Donald Trump to crowd the frame on this issue as CNN did this week, can we look at these bills and ask what they’re about? One is named the PRESS Act and another is an Anti-SLAPP bill.
Climate journalists and scientists are busy archiving public records on fossil fuels and climate change before next year’s administration has greater access to erase them. Which makes this “404 not found” destination on the hyperlinked “hearing” related to Representative Jamie Raskin’s Anti-SLAPP web page stand out from the ordinary.
Dec 03 What's Coming: Peak Oil, Maximum LNG and Ethanol, State Violence, the CCS Boom, and a Lot More Climate Litigation (Drilled Media) - “And at the same time, the rapid increase in state suppression of climate protest that we've been chronicling for more than a year now is only getting worse.”
Nov 26 Inside The Last-Ditch Legislative Effort To Protect Journalists Before Trump Comes To Town (Talking Points Memo) - “Both Trump and his close advisors, including billionaire Elon Musk, have made liberal use of the kind of suit anti-SLAPP legislation would address; plaintiffs often file these suits without any hope of winning their cases, but aim to chill criticism, bury their critics in legal fees and force them to disclose sensitive information through discovery. Trump has sued or at least sent letters threatening to sue a host of media companies, including CBS, the New York Times, the Daily Beast and the Washington Post. Musk is currently waging lawfare against Media Matters, which laid off staff, the advocacy news outlet said, in response to his legal assault.
Oct 04 Frequently asked questions about the PRESS Act (Society of Professional Journalists) - “Why should journalists get special treatment? They don’t. Numerous legal privileges having nothing to do with journalists protect confidential communications from being introduced in court. If you’ve seen a psychologist, your communications are privileged. If you’ve retained a lawyer, your communications are privileged. In fact, if you’ve ever been married, your communications are privileged. The PRESS Act recognizes that journalists depend on sources who come forward at great personal risk, and that society benefits from the resulting reporting just like society benefits from people being able to seek counseling without fearing that their therapist will have to spill their secrets in a public courtroom...”
Sep 15 2022 Chairman Raskin Introduces Legislation Establishing Federal Anti-SLAPP Statute to Protect First Amendment Rights (Raskin.house.gov Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD)) - “Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, introduced the Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP) Protection Act to establish a procedure to dismiss and deter strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) and punish entities that attempt to use this litigation to stifle First Amendment protected speech. The legislation follows a Subcommittee hearing yesterday that highlighted the fossil fuel industry’s use of SLAPPs to silence environmental activists and non-profits who speak out against proposed fossil fuel pipelines and other projects that contribute to climate change.”
Unreality Election 2024
Unreality on the economy, among other factors, won the election. Noticeable is how seldom voters talk about the economy in their own words. They say abstract things the media says, like “interest rates were high.” Maybe they’re frustrated looking for work on ghost job sites. If so, the reporters would do well by capturing that. But polls show people who voted for Trump said after election day the economy had improved, seemingly overnight.
Nov 21 Lots of Republicans suddenly think the economy wasn’t that bad after all (Washington Post) - “You can see it at the very far right of the graph above, that downward shift in ‘worse off financially’ and the upward shift in ‘about the same.’ Among Democrats, views of how they fare now relative to a year ago haven’t changed much in the past month. Among Republicans, though, there’s been a 16-point drop in the percentage saying that they were doing worse a year ago.”
May 22 Majority of Americans wrongly believe US is in recession – and most blame Biden (The Guardian) - A Harris poll conducted exclusively for The Guardian found “49% believe the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year, though the index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.” And also found “49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a near 50-year low.”
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