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Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

BONUS: The Playwright Who Just Won the Tony Awards

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Josh Szeps

Education, Comedy, Comedy Interviews, Self-improvement, Society & Culture

4.5905 Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Over the weekend, the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play went to Eureka Day, a brave, hilarious satire of wokeness, vaccine denial, identity politics and social justice. Fresh from Broadway, the Sydney production is on now at the Seymour Centre. Its playwright, Jonathan Spector, joined Josh from California before his Tony triumph.

Eureka Day is playing in Sydney until the 21st June 2025 at the Seymour Centre. You can find out more here.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

G'day, humans.

0:03.9

Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.

0:06.6

We have a little treat for you today, a bonus episode, because over the weekend, the Tony Awards were held in New York City, Broadway's Night of Nights, the Oscars for Plays, and the winner of the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play was an audacious, hilarious play about

0:24.0

cancel culture and social justice and identity politics called Eureka Day. I had the pleasure of

0:30.0

sitting down with the playwright a few days before the Tony win. He's based in Oakland, California,

0:35.3

and the play is set at a very woke private school in

0:39.3

Berkeley, California, and follows the parents and teachers as they wrestle with vaccine

0:43.7

mandates. Quite interestingly, the play was written in 2018, 2017, 2018. It first appeared off

0:51.7

Broadway and then at London's Old Vic and returned to Broadway into the craziness of COVID vaccines and new conversations about mandates and sort of peak wokeness.

1:02.6

And it's now more relevant than ever.

1:04.5

I spoke with the playwright about all that and more.

1:07.1

I hope you enjoy this little taste of the one and only Jonathan Specter.

1:15.5

Thank you. I hope you enjoy this little taste of the one and only Jonathan Specter. I was fascinated after I read the script to realize that it was written in 2017.

1:21.1

Is that right?

1:21.8

Yeah, I think I started working on it in late 2016 and, yeah,

1:27.3

I sort of had it finished in 2017 and then it had its first production in 2018. I mean, you were ahead of your time. It feels very post-22. Yes. I mean, what's strange is it, I mean, the vaccine conversation, yes, although it sort of changed so much because of COVID, the part that feels eerily

1:44.6

at a time in a way now is the, you know, what people call the sort of Zoom conversation

1:51.1

scene. Although when I first wrote it at the time, the technology in the play that they were

1:55.8

referencing was Facebook Live, which is what people are.

1:59.3

What are you being? And I think nobody even remembers.

2:01.6

No, exactly.

2:02.3

Yeah.

...

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