Memorizing lines is considered a bedrock of stage acting. 

But in a play that strives for naturalistic dialogue, being perfectly offbook can actually sound unrealistic. 

Listen to an average conversation, and you’ll hear mumbling and stumbling and pauses, because offstage humans figure out what they want to say in real time. 

For a performed(?) version of this linguistic pattern, search no further than Bill Irwin and Jessica Hecht in Eureka Day, now on Broadway. Daring to run the risk of looking unprepared, both thespians reflect the semantic struggle of everyday discourse, befitting two characters obsessed with rooting out any possible offense in the language they use, from word to word.

This oratorical style feels essential to Eureka Day’s pushback against the strictures of the typical debate play. While much of Jonathan Spector’s text revolves around the ensemble’s verbal sparring over vaccine mandates, Eureka Day does not focus primarily on hashing out the issue, a defining characteristic of a proper debate play. It seems more concerned with probing why the characters believe what they believe, and not what they believe. It’s a portrait of individual types more than it is a cable-news screaming match.

In a standard debate play, the cast treats their dialogue as second nature, with perfectly polished deliveries to remove any distractions from the main attraction that is the debate. But Jessica Hecht and Bill Irwin are a constant reminder that Eureka Day cares more about how they speak, as opposed to solely on what they say.

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Sit close enough to Jessica Hecht, and you’ll notice that she makes eye contact with the first few rows, no matter the show.