NEW YORK — Among myriad pandemic horrors was the Zoom school board meeting, a soul-sucking collection of faces in little boxes, raising digital hands and arguing over who is on mute. Often, an entirely different and far more salacious meeting was taking place in the chat channel.

One such hilariously unhinged chat appears for a while on a digital screen in the new Broadway production of Jonathan Spector’s “Eureka Day.” It’s the best moment in a satirical takedown of sanctimonious board members of a private elementary school in California, hapless virtue signalers fighting for moral superiority even as they deal with the messy realities of shared governance and the impossibility of finding consensus in polarized America. Even its most liberal parts, such as in Berkeley, California.

As directed by former Steppenwolf Theatre artistic director Anna D. Shapiro at Manhattan Theatre Club, where it stars Jessica Hecht, Bill Irwin, Thomas Middleditch, Amber Gray and Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz, “Eureka Day” is not explicitly a play about the COVID crisis in education. The pseudo-progressive school board, which meets in person in the library, actually is dealing with varying opinions among parents about vaccines, as precipitated by a kid in school coming down with mumps. But, even though this work actually was penned and first performed prior to the pandemic (in Berkeley, ‘natch), it now functions as a presciently penned proxy for that era of constant adult fighting about if, or when, it was safe for schools to reopen for kids missing their educations.

On a broader level, “Eureka Day” is also about the impossibility of agreement when everybody ties themselves up in knots, trying to use unselfish language to mask raw self-interest, the force that governs everything from boards of education to condo associations. Education is particularly vulnerable to this kind of hypocrisy because of the powerful motivation parents feel when it comes to doing their best for their own kids, even as they pontificate entirely alternate philosophies for the children of other people.

So it goes here as the board’s older idealists, amusingly played by Hecht and Irwin, cling to their hard-fought lefty ideals even as the polite world they once knew falls apart around them. The younger voices are hardly immune, though, and Spector even adds in a sexual affair to spice up the action. As you watch and cringe, alliances are formed and betrayals of old friends are executed, even as lots of righteous blather covers up this multitude of sins.

At times in “Eureka Day,” it feels like these mostly older, elite do-gooders, the kind with “White Fragility” on their nightstands and the right “woke” language in their mouths, are overly easy targets. And I had moments when I wished the play had at least hinted at the nonprofit theater’s own complicity in all this stuff. Acting out of self-interest and self-preservation while using virtuous language hardly is an unknown thing in the arts, especially these past few years. And Spector is careful not to really take risks when it comes to potentially giving offense to the industry’s dominant ideologues, not all of whom are hippyish white boomers.

So there’s that. Still, satire has no obligation to be constructive and I thought “Eureka Day” to be an amusingly observed, sharply penned and generally well-performed play with character types who will be all too familiar to anyone who has (or had) kids in such an exhausting kind of private school. At the performance I saw, the creepingly nasty chat screen got waves of laughs. And both Hecht and Irwin are game to poke fun at their own personas, to some degree. Irwin talking up the merits of a mime is especially funny.

The title, of course, is a very clever play on words and, in the end, this play seems mostly to be a plea that we get better at accepting that humans are imperfect, mostly selfish creatures, capable of only limited forms of cooperation. Good luck with that.

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At the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 47th St., New York; www.manhattantheatreclub.com.

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