A parent advisory board at a progressive private school thinks it's found the special sauce for school governance, until a mumps outbreak at the fictional Eureka Day School makes consensus a hard thing to achieve.
That’s the story unfolding in Eureka Day, the first play of Heartland Theatre Company’s 2026-27 season.
The play marks Missy Thibodeaux-Thompson’s Heartland debut, though she said she’s long been an admirer of the Normal-based troupe. Eric Thibodeaux-Thompson, her husband, has directed at Heartland twice, and Thibodeaux-Thompson said they catch Heartland productions whenever they can. Eric Thibodeaux-Thompson launched the theater program at the University of Illinois in Springfield, moving the family to Central Illinois from metro Atlanta in 2002. Missy is a professor of theatre in the program.
“This is a brilliant play,” she said. “It just so happened I had seen a production in Pittsburgh in March, and I had heard nothing of the play before that production—and loved it.”
When the opportunity to direct it popped into her inbox, it was an easy yes.
“It would be easy to say this is a play about vaccines,” she said. “It’s not. It’s a play about communication, about relationships, about how communication is and can be affected by position.”
Thibodeaux-Thompson said this is a community that prides itself on working from a consensus-based model. In the opening scene, a new parent [portrayed by Jennifer Rusk] attempts to raise a motion, à la Robert’s Rules of Order, used in most democratic governmental bodies.
Instead, they talk for as long as necessary about ostensibly mundane items, like a drop-down menu on the school’s application form, for hours, if that’s what it takes to reach common ground.
“When the stakes become much more personal, that consensus-based model becomes very challenging,” Thibodeaux-Thompson said.
Time-travelling to 2018
Eureka Day takes place in the near past, specifically 2018, which Thibodeaux-Thompson said is an important detail. The school’s parents are facing a communicable disease outbreak in a pre-pandemic world, well before Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. brought vaccine skepticism to the federal government — at the dawn of hybrid communication and well after a 1998 study, now debunked, cast doubt on vaccine safety by falsely claiming they caused autism.
“Spector, the playwright, is very clear and has some notes in the script about—these characters are very genuine, real human beings. They feel passionately about things. They have strong feelings, and they are not caricatures,” she said.
“It would be easy to sort of slip into that, but that cheapens the story. It cheapens the material and it cheapens part of the message of this play.”
Another detail: While the play has just six actors, the wider school community is represented via emboldened parents communication via online chat, which Thibodeaux-Thompson said adds a layer of complexity to the consensus model.
“We witness, pre-pandemic, the distinction between in-person communication and virtual communication,” she said. “I find it fascinating and amazing that Spector really encapsulates that, really had his finger on the pulse of what happens when you’re hiding behind a keyboard.”
Eureka Day runs Aug. 27-Sept. 12 at Heartland Theatre Company, 1110 Douglas St., Normal. Tickets are $21 at 309-452-8709 and heartlandtheatre.org.
