What could go wrong at a private school whose five-member board of directors makes all decisions based on consensus and has what benefitted the community at heart as their guiding principle. A board so committed to inclusion that The Eureka Day School in Berkeley, California’s cultural identity drop-down menu for prospective parents offers eleven choices. And if Eli (an oblivious but well-meaning Thomas Middleditch) has his way, because of his “deeper learning” around the issue of inclusivity, the list would include “transracial adoptee.” What could go wrong? The undercurrents in this opening discussion foreshadow fissures in the Eureka Day primary school’s foundations of “social-emotional learning, social justice and developing the whole child” and an open pathway to moral ambiguity.

Jonathan Spector’s “Eureka Day,” currently running at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, is a complex and thoughtful trope for the upside and downside of such moral ambiguity and challenges the audience to come to terms with issues of “fact-based” decision making, inclusion, feeling seen and not othered, gender neutral pronouns and how these important concepts factor into dealing with a crisis in the community. What happens, indeed, when a mumps outbreak at the school forces the board to examine the facts about vaccinating infants and herd immunity? And what happens when two children of board members contract the mumps, the memory of one child of a board member who dies after inoculation years ago surfaces, and the Alameda County Health Officer suggests quarantine for the affected students and highly recommends vaccination for the student population?

After grappling with the issue as a board – and not being able to reach consensus – Eli suggests it is time for a “Community Activated Conversation.” Don (a calm and gate-keeping Bill Irwin) and Suzanne (a warm and gracious Jessica Hecht) concur. New board member Carina (a thoughtful and dedicated Amber Gray) – a Black lesbian who just moved back west with her wife from the east coast – rightly questions what the Community Activated Conversation might be and Meiko (a wry and reserved Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz) – late to the discussion because her daughter Olivia has a fever and a swollen face – demurs to scheduling the event for the following day. The Conversation transpires on the Facebook Live platform so all parents can “be part of” the conversation.

Any semblance of unanimity about vaccinations and herd immunity that was present in the board discussion, quickly evaporates during the Community Activated Conversation when the “community” begins to flood the Live Stream (projection design by David Bengali Play) conversation with everything but the assigned topic. The comments run the gamut from the typical, “But I heard” intrusions to completely meanspirited and offensive posts. It is a risky business to write an entire scene in which the actors are upstaged by the silence of the hilarious stream of comments from a Live Screen session projected on the school library’s back wall. However, playwright Jonathan Spector succeeds, and the Live Stream scene successfully serves as the crisis of the play.

The heightened action in the final scenes would require multiple spoiler alerts. It is enough to know that the provenance of facts, the veracity of facts, and all the honorable goals of the Eureka Day community are challenged, some upended – all of this with considerable casualties, racism, othering, and a host of other” unthinkable” atrocities. Under Anna D. Shapiro’s astute direction, the cast brings authenticity and honesty to their complex characters. As they crisscross Todd Rosenthal’s realistic school library set, the characters challenge all preconceptions of truth, justice, and the American Way.