Jessica Hecht has played a variety of roles over a long career—from the perceptive Beatrice in A View From the Bridge (which earned her a Tony nomination) to the free-spirited Alice in 2023’s Summer, 1976 (where she got a second Tony nomination). But within her roster of good-hearted women, with spines of steel underneath their affability, Hecht has another particular talent: playing women who seem serene on the surface but hide a darkness underneath, those who might be a bit scary. As New York Magazine once wrote, “Hecht is terrifying when she wants to be.”
Currently on Broadway, Hecht is playing a mother of six in the play Eureka Day—one who loves her children so much that she refuses to vaccinate them. Hecht does believe in vaccines. But, as someone who considers herself something of a “people pleaser,” playing a person who is flawed can be freeing. “I am somebody that walks around thinking, ‘Oh, I didn't say the right thing. I think I insulted that person,’” she admits. “And so, to play somebody who doesn't care or doesn't think so much about what they say before they say it—it is fabulous. It's very liberating. It's my own kind of therapy.” She then adds with a chuckle, "I still like therapy."
Eureka Day, written by Jonathan Spector, is set in 2018 in a private day school in a liberal community in Eureka, California, four hours north of Berkeley. It’s currently running at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre—with an opening night of December 16, in a limited engagement until January 19, 2025. It also stars Bill Irwin, Amber Gray, Thomas Middleditch, and Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz as school board members who have to figure out what to do when there’s a mumps outbreak in their elementary school. Sure, public health guidelines dictate that they isolate unvaccinated students and recommend the MMR vaccines to all students. But how can they do so in a way that doesn’t shame families who choose to not vaccinate their children, families who are also part of the community? It's the plight of being good, accepting liberals who preach inclusion as a core value. Spector previously told Playbill that he was inspired to write the play when he discovered that his friends were anti-vaxxers.
Suzanne can traditionally be considered as a villain, but Hecht plays her with astonishing complexity—the character is simultaneously charming (such as when she brings in scones from a female-owned bakery) and cringeworthy (such as when she racially profiles the one Black parent on the board).
Hecht admits that in order to truthfully play Suzanne, she’s gone deep down the anti-vaxxer rabbit hole. “I've done a fair amount of research, and a very interesting thing is that people who are true anti-vaxxers—not just conspiracy theorists but really at their core—feel there's something that could corrupt either them or their child. They have had these very personal experiences where the vaccine or something with modern medicine or science has hurt them,” she explains. “It’s almost like a religious feeling.”
Hecht is innately empathetic, so much so that whenever she speaks to someone in person, she unconsciously picks up their ticks. “I very often pick up habits that the person I'm talking to has. So that if I'm talking to somebody who has a really poor posture, I might start to, like, take on their posture,” she says, before analyzing herself with surprising clarity: “It was then explained on this podcast about the brain, that there are certain people who are anxious about there being a perceived difference between yourself and someone else—so in order to close that gap, you take on little bits of their behavior to make them think that you're connecting...When I was young, I used to just do very poor mimicry and very poor accents. I would like to play around with being able to have the ear of somebody else, just because it seemed so much more interesting than my own life."
But what this mirroring, which she admits she’s “not particularly proud of,” allows her to do is access what other people who are different from her might be feeling. It's Method-esque without completely losing herself. In the case of anti-vaxxers, Hecht can see where their skepticism comes from—after all, most Americans are unsatisfied with the state of American healthcare. “My own father was a physician, and he doesn't even have a doctor, because there’s too few gerontologists. So, this distrust of medicine...is very prevalent right now.”
In fact, the more she’s been diving into Eureka Day, Hecht has realized that this very modern satire—with its tech-savvy moms—isn’t so different from the many period-set plays she's done by Arthur Miller, including when she did A View From the Bridge, After the Fall, and The Price on Broadway. She recalls how in A View From the Bridge, she also played a flawed woman, Beatrice, who stays with her husband even when he lusted after her niece. It may not be understandable to a modern audience, but Miller helped Hecht find her way through each complicated scene in a very "meat and potatoes" way.
“He would look at the way the scenes were constructed and talk about them in such a practical way," Hecht recalls. “We're often looking for some way of figuring out people's behavior that is really complex and really knotted. And [Arthur] would just say [for instance], ‘Here's this wife. She made this very nice dinner, and her husband is really late. This is the third time she's made a beautiful dinner, and he's really late.’ So that's the scene. And you don't need to think about so much, right? Like, where is he? We’re always trying to make our jobs harder—all of us, writers, actors, journalists, we make it so hard. And it's really about just looking at the reality of what the scene is about, or the story is about, and making it accessible to everybody.”
For Hecht, that includes playing human beings, flaws and all. And while she’s not condoning their behavior, she’s not letting audiences dismiss them, either. “I've played a lot of Arthur Miller characters that were, in some ways, women who were under the thumb of their husbands or under the thumb of society—who weren't evolved in terms of our value system for women,” explains Hecht. “I felt often that people would look at them and say, ‘You're representing these women who are so un-evolved.’” Here, she doesn’t get offended, instead she just adds, gently and kindly: “No, I'm representing a reality: [Miller] wasn't a misogynist. He was somebody looking at women and saying, ‘These are the trappings of being human at this time.’”
And Hecht thinks Eureka Day is doing that same thing: “I think that Jonathan, too, is trying to represent a reality of people that may not feel great but is so true and that can really upset us. It’s fascinating to me.”
Granted, Eureka Day isn't setting out to upset people—it is a comedy after all. But it's a whip smart one and topical. After all, as the recent presidential election showed, even in a liberal bubble like New York, there are still people who believe things that the majority would consider illogical. So how do we live together? Eureka Day doesn’t give any simple answers, but the questions are still worth asking.
“I hope New York audiences will laugh at themselves,” says Hecht. “And actually, I really hope that New York audiences will recognize that the extreme views of whom they perceive of as ‘the other’ are probably views that people inside their community hold, and are just quieter about it. And that an extreme view is not always held by someone who's unwell or who’s a conspiracy theorist. An extreme view might be held by somebody who had a certain experience—that you, I believe with this play, are forced to actually look at. Whether you can accept it or not, hopefully you might understand it.”
Jessica Hecht
Jessica Hecht
Jessica Hecht
Jessica Hecht
Jessica Hecht
