“Thank you for being the voice of reason,” some Manhattan Theatre Club patrons have said to Amber Gray after performances of Eureka Day. She flashes them her generous, full-faced smile, but thinks to herself, “Well, now I know your politics.”
Originally commissioned in 2016—before the world sprouted its population of amateur epidemiologists—Jonathan Spector’s satire plays like a period piece. It shows how a private California elementary school’s Executive Committee—a governing body we see split hairs, parse words and gobble up artisanal scones—crumbles under parental pressure and internal fractures when a mumps outbreak tests their religion of “consensus.” Gray plays Carina, the newest committee member and a first-year parent at the school, who becomes the most vocal advocate for vaccine requirements. It puts her at odds with Suzanne (Jessica Hecht), a veteran parent and committee member who has her reasons for disagreeing.
(Photo: Jeremy Daniel)
For the record, Gray’s own position on the vaccine debate (a thoroughly researched one, mind you) does generally align with Carina’s. “We’re pretty vaccinated,” she says about her family unit—she has two sons, ages six and nine, with her partner Gaylen Hamilton, whom she met as a member of the Reverend Billy & the Stop Shopping Choir (imagine a fake church service where performance art meets environmentalism, anti-consumerism and civil rights activism). Gray was also raised an army brat, which automatically made vaccines a way of life. “You have to get them all traveling around the world.”
Still, she says warily, “I don’t know that I am the voice of reason,” the “I” being Carina. “I mean, Jonathan has said as much as well about my character—but he’s allowed to think that as the playwright.”
As an actor, Gray doesn’t let herself think like an observer. She burrows into her characters and then expands them from the inside—a quality that may account for her otherworldly resume: Hadestown’s imbibing goddess of springtime Persephone (Tony nod); Great Comet’s glamorous and incestuous socialite Hélène; Claudia in the existential maze of David Ives and Stephen Sondheim’s Here We Are. “It’s really interesting to just be realistic on stage,” she says like a wide-eyed visitor in a new land. “You always play the magical character,” a dresser of hers once told her. Carina, with her neat ponytail and sensible shoes, is not magical.
“We were directed to really try to find one another for as long as possible, until we couldn’t take it anymore.” –Amber Gray
In her brief time on stage as a mere mortal (she’ll be finishing Eureka Day February 2 and immediately jumping into the London production of Hadestown February 11), she has no interest in making a public service announcement, or being the horse audiences can feel proud to have backed. After all, the race isn’t rigged. “The reason I love Suzanne’s arguments is because half the stuff [she says] is totally true,” Gray notes. She relishes the legitimate debate happening on the Friedman stage (albeit amid silly self-floggings about an insensitive eighth-grade production of Peter Pan and performative readings of Rumi).
Since the play’s 2018 premiere, which was followed by an off-Broadway production and a West End run, Spector has adjusted the dialogue for the American ears of 2024. “The zingy jokes have been removed because it made the conversation come off as a little trite,” Gray says. Her first reading of Carina was also much more biting. “I read most of my lines with some snark, for humor’s sake.” Director Anna D. Shapiro, a Tony Award winner for August: Osage County, directed the cast away from that cutting tone. “Six years ago, I think we could laugh about it a little more,” she muses. (The play is still a comedy and features an unhinged Facebook Live chat that reliably elicits a raucous frenzy). “But we were directed to really try to find one another for as long as possible, until we couldn’t take it anymore.”
Audiences have not made the same agreement. “Suddenly we were on Jerry Springer,” Gray says with a slight cringe, describing a moment that, on occasion, invites audience applause. Suzanne, a woman who trips the “Karen” alarm early in the play, has made some false assumptions about Carina, a queer, Black woman who has spent her life taking it on the chin (Gray herself identifies as biracial). When she finally gets a delicious opportunity to put Suzanne in her place, the crowd responds with glee.
Well, this crowd does.
“If we went into this in my mom’s town in Texas, they would love Suzanne,” Gray says. And she doesn’t begrudge them that affinity, even as the one absorbing all of Suzanne’s slights. “It’s Jess f**cking Hecht,” says Gray. “I love her and I’m crazy about her as a human.” Set aside her softness for her costar, “Jonathan Spector did say we were the first Suzanne-Carina pair to find our way back towards each other,” she says. “[Audiences] are quick to dislike her. But people are more complicated than that.” Gray amends the statement: “They’re all complicated. And they’re all hypocrites.”
(Photo: Jeremy Daniel)
It’s an observation, not an accusation—one built on 20 years in the trenches of political activism. “Those people walk the walk,” she says of her fellow Reverend Billy choir members who have sung to tree-sitters in California and “exorcised” the spirit of BP in the middle of the Tate Modern. “You’re moving the needle slightly for the next generation. It is thankless work.” She concedes that it’s also imperfect work. “Just by being an American, you will be hurting a land somewhere or a people somewhere. You can pick your three battles, but in 500 other ways, you’ll be a hypocrite.
“But—” she adds with a glimmer of optimism, “that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pick your three battles.”
“They’re all complicated. And they’re all hypocrites.” –Amber Gray
Add kids in the mix and the calculus gets even more complicated. Just look at Carina, who, at the top of the play, applauds Eureka Day’s emphasis on social justice (peep the library’s extensive “Social Justice” section just behind the cheery alphabet carpet)—while ignoring the fact that moving her son Victor from public to private school is ethically fraught to begin with. “When it’s your kid, you get very irrational,” says Gray.
(Photo: Jeremy Daniel)
Both of Gray’s sons are enrolled in a Blue Ribbon School in Brooklyn—a prime breeding ground for parental excess. But she’s not much wooed by achievement. “When the nine-year-old was four, it was early days of the pandemic. He was in online school and by October could write a whole paragraph,” she remembers. “I was like, ‘That’s a cute party trick, but I don’t need you to be able to do that yet.’” In all her years as a parent, she’s been to one PTA meeting: “Never again.” She repeats for clarity: “Strong never again.”
Career choices are what fog her head the most as a parent. “I keep trying not to do eight shows a week because of my kids,” she says. “When I take breaks to be with my children more, after a month, I start to get depressed. And then when I go back to work, I get depressed.”
If she starts studying a script or music in the house, her older son will get suspicious. “Do you have a job?!” he’ll ask. “Why are you singing?!” Eureka Day being a one-act, she’s figured out she can make it home by 9:30PM if the trains comply. “He’s totally still awake, just waiting for me to come home.”
“I need both things,” Gray says. “And it’s really hard to balance those two things.”
And then sometimes, the two worlds collide. “I went into the office the other day to pick up my kids early and the principal was like, ‘I saw you in the subway.’” She had spotted a Eureka Day poster with its pointed tagline, “One school. Too many principals.” In her retelling, Gray indicated a subtle prodding tone from the school head—perhaps she was anticipating a surge of participation because of Gray’s stint immersed in the politics of education.
With the same crinkly-eyed smile I imagine makes many appearances at the Friedman Theatre’s stage door, she thought to herself, “Still not going to come to a PTA meeting.”
