14 | FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Culture
On Monday morning in New York, a
strange sight overtook Times Square: a
ballet class.
At about 7 a.m., around 300 dancers —
boys and girls, men and women — took
turns glissading across the concrete at
44th Street and Seventh Avenue, which
was transformed into a scene from
“Fame.” Piles of dance bags formed
mountains. Supporters held signs with
messages like “#metutu,” “Boys Dance
Too” and “I Wish I’d Started at 6!!!” It
wasn’t confrontational, but it did make a
statement.
The class was a response to the previ-
ous Thursday’s edition of the ABC tele-
vision show “Good Morning America,”
on which Lara Spencer, a host, laughed
at the news that Prince George was
planning to study ballet. “We’ll see how
long that lasts,” she said. On Monday,
she apologized for her remarks.
“I screwed up, I did,” she said. “The
comment I made about dance was in-
sensitive. It was stupid and I am deeply
sorry.”
As criticism continued over the week-
end — heavy hitters like Chita Rivera
and Mitzi Gaynor weighed in online —
the dancer and choreographer Debbie
Allen put Ms. Spencer in touch with
Travis Wall of “So You Think You Can
Dance.”
“She knows Debbie, and Debbie was
like, ‘You need to talk to Travis,’” Mr.
Wall said after the class on Monday.
“‘He’ll be able to talk to you without an-
ger in his voice.’”
Mr. Wall said that after watching the
segment, “I was horrified thinking
about little boys hearing the laughter.”
But he was open to talking with Ms.
Spencer.
“We all just wanted to have a conver-
sation about the problem in this country
that we’ve never really talked about un-
til now, which is how brave it is for a
male dancer at a young age to make the
decision,” Mr. Wall said. “And the scru-
tiny and the bullying that comes with it.”
The Times Square class, near ABC’s
studios, where “Good Morning Amer-
ica” is broadcast, was organized by two
Broadway dancers, Charlie Williams
and Sam Quinn. It was a way to show
younger dancers not just the power of
the dance community, but the power of
dance. Helping to guide the participants
through pliés, pirouettes and, yes, even
jumps on concrete, were Mr. Wall and
Robbie Fairchild, a former principal
dancer at New York City Ballet who
went on to star in “An American in
Paris” on Broadway.
Mr. Fairchild said that looking out to
see all the young dancers open their
arms at the same time was incredible.
“We are such a loving, accepting com-
munity, and if one of us feels attacked in
any way, it’s amazing that we flock to-
gether and hold tight,” he said. “We have
all had similar experiences, and we all
have the same PTSD.”
Harrison Coll, a City Ballet soloist on
leave to work on the film of “West Side
Story,” showed up for the outdoor class,
because it was “a beautiful demonstra-
tion,” he said, “that has nothing to do
with hate.”He added, with a laugh: “It was a good
class, too. They really challenged every-
one, and I liked it when Robbie said,
‘Ballet’s hard. We’re still going to make
it hard.’”
Gilbert Bolden III, another City Ballet
dancer, who said he was bullied through-
out middle school, was an impressivesight on Monday — he took class in point
shoes, which are usually the province of
female dancers. For the past two years,
they have been part of his training. “It’s
such an open art form,” he said. “Why
not? If you want to do something, just go
ahead and do it.”
Axel Stahl, 11, who has studied at the
City Ballet-affiliated School of American
Ballet since he was 5, said his advice toother students was “keep dancing.”
The Monday segment of “Good Morn-
ing America” also featured an interview
with Mr. Wall, Mr. Fairchild and Fabrice
Calmels of the Joffrey Ballet. “More em-
pathy would be lovely,” Mr. Calmels said
on the program. As a teacher, he said he
sees young boys drop out of ballet “be-
cause of the social stigma around the
form. Children should be entitled to ex-
perience things without being bullied.”
Mr. Wall said some people in the
dance world had asked him if Ms.
Spencer was getting off too easily. “Peo-
ple make mistakes,” he said. “And you
have to think about the bigger picture:
We brought attention to something that
possibly was never going to get the light
of day, and now everyone’s aware of how
incredible it is for a boy to be a dancer.”
Mr. Fairchild agreed. “I think so much
good can come out of this as long as we
remain people who are able to forgive,”
he said. “It’s also such a divisive society.
Who are going to be the people to try and
bridge gaps? Artists.”Spinning a mistake into a lesson
Carelessness by a TV host
in talking about ballet ends
with a victory for dancers
BY GIA KOURLAS
MISHA FRIEDMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESClockwise from above: Lara Spencer, who
laughed about Prince George studying
ballet; Travis Wall, left, and Robbie
Fairchild leading a class for dancers in
Times Square; and some of their students.
ABC“We are such a loving, accepting
community, and if one of us feels
attacked in any way, it’s amazing
that we flock together.”“Eureka Day” is a play about a school in
Berkeley, Calif., where the soccer team
cheers when the other side scores a
goal, and where parents were so con-
cerned that an eighth-grade production
of “Peter Pan” would have “colonialist
issues” that it was set in outer space. It
is also a school where many — many —
families refuse to vaccinate their chil-
dren.
In the first act, the principal presides
over a “Community Activated Conver-
sation” with parents (also known as a
Facebook Live chat) to talk about an
outbreak of mumps.
The conversation does not go well.
“We’re all threatened by your ANTI-
SCIENCE DEATH CULT,” one parent of-
fers.
“Do what you want,” comes the reply,
“just keep your POISON off my kids.”
Jonathan Spector, 40, who wrote “Eu-
reka Day,” said that he started thinking
about vaccines as a subject after moving
with his girlfriend, now his wife, to the
Bay Area. When their friends started
having children, whispers began to cir-
culate at farmers markets and house
parties that this person or that person
was refusing the shots.
“I had this experience of talking to
people who were very smart, very well
educated and sort of agreed with me
about everything,” Mr. Spector said.
“And then you would realize that in this
one area, they seem to live on a different
planet than you do.”
“Eureka Day,” which opened on
Thursday at Walkerspace in New York,
follows four parents and the principal as
the school faces down the mumps — and
as the perceived good of the individual
crashes into the good of the group.
It arrives in New York as public
health officials struggle to contain an
outbreak of measles, and it pulls at a
larger thread many feel unraveling:
What do you do when you cannot agree
on basic facts?
The divisions do not track along typi-
cal political battle lines, Mr. Spector add-
ed, making it richer material for a play-
wright.
“Abortion or gun control or climate
change — any one of those things is pre-
dictive of all the others, but not vac-
cines,” he said. “There are vaccine skep-
tics on the far left and on the far right,”
and, he added, it is more difficult to
wave them off as unthinking nincom-
poops if they otherwise agree with you.
Indeed, “Eureka Day,” which is al-
ready scheduled for productions in Phil-
adelphia, Washington and Sonoma
County, Calif., gives the anti-vaccine
parents their humanity, though it does
not buy their arguments. Mr. Spector
said it made him uncomfortable even
discussing the play in terms of the “vac-
cination debate.”
“I don’t feel like it’s a debate,” he said.
“From my point of view, the science is
settled.”
Nonetheless, Josh Costello, the artis-
tic director of Aurora Theater Company
in Berkeley, which commissioned the
play and staged its world premiere last
year, said that anti-vaccine audience
members who saw it seemed comfort-
able with their portrayal.
“We spent a lot of time talking about
how we wanted the play to accuratelyrepresent people’s points of view with-
out validating a point of view with which
we disagree,” Mr. Costello said. “That’s a
really fine line to walk.”
Another pleasant surprise, Mr.
Costello said, was the wails of laughter
that came from the audience during the
group chat scene.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, the
audience was roaring with laughter for
like seven straight minutes,” he said.
“We had to redo some of the cues to
make it less funny so the audience could
hear the dialogue and the key lines.”
Mr. Spector said that, after discover-
ing at the New College of Florida that he
was a terrible actor, he set out to become
a director. While he had always written,
he said, “I didn’t realize that writingplays was still a thing people really did
in the world.” But as he moved from
project to project, “what was appealing
to me,” he added, “was being able to be
intimate with this writing I was really
excited about.”
He read hundreds of scripts a year as
the literary manager of the Bay Area
Playwrights Festival, and went on to get
a master of fine arts in playwriting from
San Francisco State University.
Mr. Spector lives in Oakland with his
wife, Molly Aaronson-Gelb, and their 3-
year-old daughter, Maisie, who he said
tries to rope other children into acting
out plays at school. The couple are co-
artistic directors of a small company,
Just Theater, that they founded in 2006.
Ms. Aaronson-Gelb is a director aswell as a high school drama teacher, and
some of her experiences, both as a pri-
vate school student in the Bay Area and
in previous teaching jobs, inspired the
“Eureka Day” setting. (It was the school
she attended that cheered for opposing
teams.)
“Eureka Day” is Mr. Spector’s first
production in New York. It has been di-
rected by Adrienne Campbell-Holt, who
was nursing her 2-month-old daughter,
Esme, in the rehearsal room this month
while giving the actors notes.
Her husband, Brian Wiles, plays Eli, a
parent awash in self-satisfaction and
tech money; every now and then he
gave Esme googly eyes from his seat.
One directorial challenge: managing
the laugh lines in that chat scene, whereFacebook comments are projected be-
hind the actors for the audience to read.
“The build at the end felt the most
right it’s felt,” Thomas Jay Ryan, who
portrays the principal, said after one
run-through.
“You keep saying, ‘Oh they’re going to
be screaming laughing — in Berkeley
they were screaming laughing.’ Well,
O.K.,” he added. “That’s the kiss of
death!”
But for Ms. Campbell-Holt, balancing
the laughs and the flare-ups in “Eureka
Day” is no longer just a theatrical exer-
cise.
“As a new mom,” she said later, “my
awareness of this public health crisis
has really shifted to being much more
immediate. It’s personal.”Mumps, and vaccine critics, under attack
Depicting onstage a school
where some parents won’t
immunize their children
BY ELIZABETH A. HARRIS
PHOTOGRAPHS BY TESS MAYER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESAt left, Jonathan Spector, who wrote “Eureka Day.” Above from left, Tina Benko, Brian
Wiles, Elizabeth Carter, Thomas Jay Ryan and KK Moggie at a rehearsal.RELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws
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