School vaccination discourse might not seem like the fodder of a Tony Award winning comedy, but Eureka Day is just that. The play is now making its debut in Chicago after years of theatrical success. Sophia Casa sat down with the Chicago production’s director Lili-Anne Brown to hear more.
Eureka Day, the smash hit satire made its premiere in Chicago this January in a production with TimeLine Theatre Company and Broadway in Chicago. The show, written by Jonathan Spector, is a sendup of liberalism and misinformation, focusing on the progressive Eureka Day School which finds its ideological consensus thrown into chaos when the mumps break out and a student vaccination requirement is proposed.
This past week, I had the chance to sit down with Chicago production director and Northwestern alum Lili-Anne Brown to talk with her about the show, her career, and her time on campus. Here is that conversation.
SOPHIA CASA: Starting first with Eureka Day, so this play was written in 2018, but it’s gotten more attention in the mainstream in recent years, winning the best revival of a play Tony Award in 2025 and receiving productions around the country, including now in Chicago. So, you know, as someone directing this play right now, why do you think this show has become more relevant or continued to stay relevant with audiences throughout?
LILI-ANNE BROWN: I mean, it’s a fantastic and wonderfully well-written play. That is hilarious. I think that certainly it hit the mark. I mean, his play seemed almost prescient to people once we got into the pandemic, people were like, “wait a minute, this wasn’t, this was written before 2020?” and found it hard to believe. So I am not surprised that a revival or another production happened that was successful because it feels extremely current.
CASA: This play. It is a comedy, it is a satire, but it also deals with things like vaccine discourse and also talks about things like misinformation. So through directing this play and working with the text of it, how do you balance the satire of the show with these real conversations that are being had?
BROWN: Well, we live in a really absurd time right now, don’t we? So, I think, it feels more real than anyone expects it to. It’s funny how every single business comes up to me and says how it’s relevant to their specific business, which is the mark of any great theater in terms of rehearsing it and balance. We just try to bring as much verisimilitude as we could to it.
CASA: Yeah. Lovely. And so my next question was about this relationship with TimeLine. So I know in 2018 you directed a production of Caroline or Change that they co-produced. And so can you tell me a little bit about what sort of led to this re-team up with Eureka Day?
BROWN: Yeah, I think they were interested in the play and I got a phone call asking me if I was interested in the play. And those are the kinds of phone calls that it’s really, really wonderful to get when you have people who actually know you. So it’s not sort of like a blind call because you are on a list of directors that it would be hot to get or whatever, you’re on a list of people who are working a lot right now, or you’re buzzy or whatever. Or, uh, you know, I get, I get a lot of phone calls because of that. I get a lot of phone calls because I’m Black. I get a lot of phone calls because I’m a lady. I get a lot of phone calls because I’m a Black lady and they want me to do a Black lady play.
And this is not that. And so, but it’s something that I really, really rock with. I am a comedy person. I have a comedy education and I really like doing it, but I don’t find a lot of people with my identity in that space. And so it’s nice when people know that that is a thing you do, and so you get that phone call. This happened because they actually know me, which is really cool.
CASA: You know, you are a Northwestern alum and you were involved with student theater on campus here and you know, you work within the directing spheres, acting spheres as well today. Can you tell me, you know, what’s one lesson you learned here that you still are able to carry with you?
BROWN: Oh yeah. The biggest thing I think I learned at Northwestern is how to do it myself. Which was absolutely necessary to us speaking today. I would not be here. I would not have my career if I did not know how to self-produce, because that ended up what I had to do to get my career. You know, can you go off into the world and like try to break into theater and immediately have access to hundreds of thousands of dollars? No, you will not be doing that unless you are the world’s biggest nepo baby, which, you know, we got that too at Northwestern. So totally possible. And you know, no tea, no shade. If you are the world’s biggest nepo baby, hire me please.
[They laugh]
BROWN: But as a director, what prepared me was the much more grassroots, you know, those things that did not have hundreds of thousands of dollars in the budget like I produced Ain’t Misbehavin’ in the shack in 1995 basically by myself, like I paid for it with my money from, you know, I had the job, I was working at Limited Express on Church Street, and there had not ever been a Black musical at Northwestern and I just felt like I couldn’t leave without this thing happening cause I was trying to make it happen for four years and I couldn’t get any of the student groups to produce it and I couldn’t get anybody on the faculty to, to produce it, and I just couldn’t convince anybody to produce it, so I was like, I think I’m gonna have to produce something by myself and I couldn’t afford Once on This Island with my Limited Express paycheck. I could, however, afford Ain’t Misbehavin’, and then a Black musical had been done at Northwestern.
CASA: Thank you so much. And like break a leg on the rest of the run.
BROWN: It was lovely to meet you. And thank you for having me.
Eureka Day runs from now until February 22nd at Chicago’s Broadway Playhouse.
For WNUR News, I’m Sophia Casa
