It's Jonathan Spector's Theatrical Universe, We're Just Living in It

It has been a truly wild year for playwright Jonathan Spector. It began with Manhattan Theatre Club’s Broadway premiere of his vaccine debate comedy Eureka Day, with a starry cast led by Jessica Hecht and Bill Irwin. A transfer of the Broadway production to the Kennedy Center was cancelled, citing “financial circumstances,” but that merely a blip: Eureka Day won the 2025 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play and was recently named the third-most-produced play of the 2025-26 season.

While Eureka Day is simultaneously part of Spector’s past (he wrote it nearly a decade ago at this point) and his present, he’s got fires burning elsewhere, too. Chief among them is This Much I Know, a heady new drama about decision-making, that’s currently receiving its New York debut by Theater J at 59E59. Next summer, MCC Theater will present Birthright, an exploration of Jewish American identity that debuted earlier this year at Miami New Drama.

And while he was happy to discuss all of that, I was first curious to find out if he’s had a chance to come down from it all.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

So, you had a fun springtime. Have you had a chance to relax?
Once it was all over, summer was blessedly quiet, and sort of, like, “Oh, did that happen? Maybe that was all of a dream.” It’s nice to be getting back in the swing of things.

What’s cooler for you, winning the Tony for Eureka Day or knowing that it’s the third-most produced play in the country at this point?
Oh, I don’t know; both are lovely! 

Did you even imagine that by 2025, everyone would be doing it—and that it would feel timelier than ever?
I definitely did not. A few weeks ago, I was seeing it in LA and there’s a line that Suzanne, the anti-vaxxer character, has, like “You know, they give hepatitis B vaccines to newborns; no, thank you.” And then a few days later, RFK Junior announced they’re going to try and do away with hepatitis B vaccines for newborns. So that part, it’s a little creepy and depressing.

And every audience member looks at you, like, how did you know!? Anyway, let’s move on to This Much I Know at 59E59. What inspired it?
I’m inspired by the work of Daniel Kahneman, who was a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist. His Nobel was in economics, because he and his partner, through their psychology work, revolutionized the field of decision-making, and, through that, economics. Any time people talk about cognitive biases and decision-making, so much of that comes out of their work about how our brains actually function.

His book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, shows you, to some degree, these different experiments they were doing, so you can feel yourself making these cognitive errors. There’s something about that that felt very theatrical to me, even though it’s not material that obviously lends itself to being a piece of theater. That was the jumping off point.

The play itself is several different storylines bound together around this idea of how we make decisions. It’s three actors who play 20-something roles.

Obviously, this is your New York follow up to Eureka Day, a play that gave you enormous success. Thinking about that aspect, what kind of emotions do you feel in relation to seeing This Much I Know in New York?
I feel great, in part because this production is moving in from Washington, DC, where they did it a year-and-a-half ago with the same cast, director, and design team. I already know it works and I’m very happy with the production, so I don’t have the same level of anxiety I would be having if it was the first production of a new play that was a follow-up.

Your next one in the pipeline is called Birthright; it’s at MCC Theater later this season after premiering at Miami New Drama, which is an amazing theater that’s doing very socially provocative work.
Michel Hausmann, the artistic director, is phenomenal. He really kind of cajoled me into writing Birthright. He called me a few weeks after October 7 and asked me to write a play about what’s happening right now in the American Jewish community. And I was like, “I am absolutely not going to do that.” But we kept talking and he was very persistent.

I started doing some interviews with as wide a range of Jewish people as I could, in terms of politics and religiosity and background. The one constant in those interviews was that this is the hardest time in anyone’s memory to be an American Jew, in terms of how strained relations have become within families and friendships. That felt like something I could dig into.

I think I’m the one Jew I know who didn’t go on Birthright.
I did not either, but it kept coming up, so it felt like people’s experience on Birthright was a good way to centralize it.

How do you see yourself as a writer, in terms of the material you choose and what feels important to dramatize?
I feel I have several plays that backed into a certain kind of relevance. Birthright is the only time where I have intentionally leaned into something that’s happening, which made it scary and impossible to write for a long time. Part of the reason the play spans almost 20 years is that I felt like I needed to get away from this moment, which everyone is caught up in, to be able to have the perspective to have any clarity about it.

It’s strange being a writer, being an artist, in a country that’s mid-authoritarian takeover. Normally, theater moves slowly; it takes a long time to write a play and even longer to get it programmed by theaters that are planning far in advance. It’s hard to write anything that’s trying to speak directly to this moment, just because it’s going to be three years before it’s on the stage, anyway. It’s a fool’s errand to try and do that, but it’s also impossible not to. This is the world we’re in, and that’s going to be the context for what you’re making. We can’t avoid that.