This Is Us star Susan Kelechi Watson and Superstore's Mark McKinney will join Helen Hunt on stage in Jonathan Spector's comedy Eureka Day.
Also joining them for the UK premiere of the play will be Pride's Ben Schnetzer and Kirsten Foster, who previously starred in the West End's Life of Pi production.
Set in Berkeley, California in 2017, Eureka Day "centres around the 'Executive Committee' of parents at Eureka Day School, and asks what happens when such a group needs to come to a consensus around a highly divisive issue".
The divisive issue at hand is whether or not to make vaccines mandatory for pupils at the school after an outbreak of mumps. Though the debate is weirdly topical, Spector wrote the play long before the Covid-19 pandemic.
Eureka Day will premiere this autumn at The Old Vic and will mark Helen Hunt's UK stage debut. The Oscar-winning actress will star as parent Suzanne who is a member of the parents' 'Executive Committee', and whose children attend the progressive school.
Writer Jonathan Spector told The Old Vic that he was inspired to write the play after discovering some of his "well-educated" friends with the "same politics and the same values" as him chose not to vaccinate their children.
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"I was fascinated by the idea that we could basically share the exact same world view, but in this one specific area seemed to live in different realities."
Tickets for Eureka Day are available to purchase now from Love Theatre, London Theatre Direct and From The Box Office, starting at £23.20. The production will run from September 6 until October 31 with some preview performances. Accessible performances are available on October 11 with audio description and October 14 with captions.
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Harriet is a freelance news writer specialising in TV and movies at Digital Spy.
A horror enthusiast, she joined Digital Spy after working on her own horror website, reviewing films and focusing largely on feminism in the genre.
In her spare time, Harriet paints and produces mixed-media art. She graduated from the University of Kingston with a BA in fine art, where she specialised in painting. She also has an MA in journalism from Birkbeck University.
